There had been complaints about his treatment of suspects. All right, perhaps he had been a mite overzealous, but he was getting results. But then there had been those two incidents, one after the other, where one prisoner had a black eye, and the other bruised ribs, and they’d screamed ‘police brutality’. Both had been resisting arrest and were swinging punches, but Detective Chief Inspector Hepton had preferred to believe them rather than one of his own officers. Hepton had threatened to take him off CID work and put him back into uniform.

He hadn’t told any of this to Janet. All she got was his bitterness, his resentment, and his temper. He couldn’t remember how that last row started. It had built up until he swore at her and called her filthy names. Reacting angrily, she had whipped her hand across his face. He deserved it. That’s what made it so hard to take: He bloody deserved it. He should have let it go, apologized, begged her forgiveness. But he had reacted without thought, the back of his hand cracking across her mouth, splitting her lip, making it bleed. She just looked at him with contempt, face white, blood trickling, then she slowly walked out, slamming the door behind her.

Later, the phone call from her mother’s, saying she was leaving him.

That’s when he should have swallowed his pride and gone after her. Instead he preferred to wallow in self-pity and drink himself stupid on the contents of the cocktail cabinet.

And when he finally staggered into the station, unshaven, eyes red-rimmed, there was Hepton, Chief Inspector-bloody-Hepton, waiting for him, barring his way, that nagging, jarring voice scratching away at his raw nerve ends like a fingernail dragged down a blackboard.

And then things were very blurred. He recalled flinging a punch. An almighty punch which spun Hepton around, knocked him into a filing cabinet, and sent him crashing to the floor. Then the room was full of people, angry, shouting, holding him back. Someone must have taken him home because he next remembered waking in his own bed the following morning, his head split by wedges, hoping against hope that it had all been some ghastly drunken nightmare. But Janet wasn’t in bed with him. The house was empty, her clothes gone, and his fist swollen and hurting like hell.