‘Why wouldn’t he?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘No reason for him to stick around, is there? Not now he knows—’

  ‘So, Veronica fits right in,’ Miller announced suddenly. He smiled and looked around the table. ‘Don’t you reckon?’

  Mary looked at him. ‘Yes, I just said so.’

  ‘Yeah, I know. Just . . . agreeing with you.’

  ‘Well, I’m glad.’

  ‘Don’t know why I was so worried about it, really.’

  Ruth reached across and patted him on the arm. ‘It’s understandable.’

  ‘Absolutely,’ Mary said. ‘But looking ahead, I was thinking that I’d bring in a proper accompanist.’

  Miller snorted and tried to look offended.

  ‘Oh, don’t be silly, Declan. We all know how good you are and we’re grateful for you stepping in. I’m talking about when you’re fit and ready to dance again. We need you out on the floor rather than sitting at the piano, and having someone who could accompany the group full time would solve any issues about even numbers and partners and so on.’

  ‘It’s a cracking idea, love,’ Howard said.

  ‘There would be a small increase in subs to cover the cost, but if nobody has any objections . . . ?’

  Nobody did.

  ‘Excellent,’ Mary said. ‘There’s a gentleman who plays for the Thistleton community choir who’s supposed to be very good. I’ll put out feelers.’

  ‘Right then.’ Howard stood up. ‘Who’s for another one?’

  It turned out that everyone was and, while Howard was at the bar, Nathan shuffled his chair a little closer to Miller’s. He leaned in to whisper. ‘Were you scared? That bloke waving a knife around?’

  More than once, Nathan had talked about becoming a police officer himself, claiming that he had what he thought it took. Miller saw no reason now to sugar-coat what the job might occasionally involve. The danger, the fear. ‘Yes, I was scared.’

  Nathan shook his head. ‘I think I’d’ve wet myself.’

  ‘Well, course you would.’

  ‘What, you saying you did?’

  ‘No—’

  ‘Did you wet yourself?’

  ‘No, Nathan, I didn’t. I’m saying I’m not surprised that’s what you’d do because you’ve got a certain amount of form in the involuntary wee-wee department. As I recall, there was a small . . . accident a couple of months back during that Latin medley. When you stretched, remember?’

  ‘One time,’ Nathan said. ‘It was one time and only because Mary kept telling me I could get my leg out further.’

  ‘I’m just saying, if that’s what can happen when you’re doing an over-exuberant samba, you might want to reconsider your future as one of Lancashire’s finest.’

  ‘That’s not fair, Dec,’ Nathan said. ‘I’d had four cups of tea.’ He stared down at the table and muttered, sulkily, ‘And a big bottle of Lucozade Sport . . . ’

  Back at home and not yet ready for bed, Miller watered his plants while listening to the radio – a particularly irksome phone-in about climate change. Just as he was ready to chip in and point out to one misguided caller that raging forest fires and catastrophic floods were not simply ‘unseasonable weather’, Alex hijacked his train of thought with a few well-chosen remarks of her own.

  ‘That was about as subtle as a flying sledgehammer,’ she said.

  Miller looked round. Alex was sitting on the sofa flicking through a magazine. ‘What was?’

  ‘Your grinding change of subject in the pub. Suddenly talking about that new woman . . . Veronica or whatever her name is, when Howard was steering the conversation somewhere you didn’t want it to go.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re on about,’ Miller said.

  She sighed and put her magazine down. ‘Of course you do, because I’m only saying what you’re thinking. Remember, Miller, that’s how this whole “chit-chat with a dead person” business works?’

  ‘I was just getting fed up talking about what had happened at Slack’s.’

  ‘No, what you didn’t want to talk about was why Dennis Draper almost certainly hasn’t scarpered. Why he’s probably still around.’

  Miller leaned down to prod at the soil in a spider plant.

  ‘Howard was about to say it and you didn’t want him to, because you’re ashamed about what you didn’t tell Draper. The one key bit of information you decided to keep to yourself the other night.’

  Miller dribbled water into the plant. He didn’t need reminding.

  ‘He hasn’t got the briefcase.’

  ‘How do you know what he’s got and what he hasn’t?’

  Draper had asked Miller how he’d known Slack didn’t have the case and Miller had said nothing.

  ‘You didn’t tell Draper because if he knew that the police already have the briefcase and that he’s never going to get it, he would have scarpered and you’d never have a chance to catch him.’

  ‘He might have scarpered anyway,’ Miller said. ‘We came close to getting him the other night, so he might have decided to cut his losses.’

  ‘You know that’s not true, Miller. You want him around so you can get him, simple as that. So that when you do, it might give you some leverage with the likes of Cutler and Massey.’ Alex pointed. ‘Oh, I think that bromeliad’s looking a bit thirsty.’

  Miller stepped across to give the plant a drink.

  ‘So, now you feel rubbish because rather than put an end to this by simply telling Draper he’s wasting his time, you’ve left him out there thinking someone else might have the case.’

  ‘Like who?’

  She shrugged. ‘Don’t ask me, but while he thinks someone’s got it, that someone’s life is at risk. And that’s down to you. That’s the choice you made.’

  ‘I wasn’t thinking very clearly,’ Miller said. ‘These were split-second decisions. He did have a knife, remember?’

  ‘Yes, I know he did and you were an idiot going in there in the first place.’

  ‘Mary said I was brave.’

  ‘OK, a brave idiot, but still an idiot. And while I remember, that was a bit mean, reminding Nathan about his samba accident.’

  ‘Funny though, right?’

  They looked at each other, Miller pulling the stupid face that usually eased the tension and made Alex smile. It worked and, for the first time in days, he felt like smiling himself, if only briefly.

  ‘FYI,’ Alex said, ‘she seems nice and all that, but I was a way better dancer than this Veronica will ever be.’

  ‘Don’t be daft,’ Miller said. ‘Obviously you were.’

  She had said it quietly and it had sounded more sorrowful than anything, a plea rather than a boast, and for all that these conversations had often brought him a degree of comfort, now Miller wanted to do the one thing that was quite impossible. He wanted to pull his wife to him, hold her close and assure her that she could never be replaced.

  Not on a dance floor and never in his heart.

  He turned to water the umbrella plant they’d bought one Saturday from Ormskirk market and when he looked back, Alex had gone.

  ‘She is pretty good, though,’ he said. ‘Veronica. Her Viennese waltz was seriously tasty.’ He waited, wondering if Alex would pop back to tell him what an annoying arse he was, but there was only the space where she’d been.

  Miller knew that she’d been right – the idiotic way he’d handled things at Slack’s and more importantly the stupid and selfish decision he’d taken when talking to Dennis Draper.

  If anyone else got hurt, it would be down to him.

  With Alex no longer around, Miller took out his frustration at the radio instead; shouting loudly enough to wake several neighbours, put the wind up a passing dog-walker and to send Fred and Ginger scuttling straight into their straw-stuffed shoebox.

  THIRTY-TWO

  Two mornings earlier, Miller had limped into the briefing room to be greeted with the hearty applause of his colleagues. Even DI Tim Sullivan had managed a congratulatory if somewhat grudging nod. It was the sort of reception normally reserved for those occasions when a confession had been obtained or a guilty verdict delivered, but everyone was well aware that rescuing Keith Slack from the clutches of a ruthless killer had been a major result.

  Whatever the operational irregularities.

  Miller had accepted the plaudits with his customary modesty: holding both arms aloft and punching the air like he’d just snogged a supermodel or scored the winner in the dying seconds of the FA Cup final. Then he’d clocked Xiu eyeballing him ferociously and dialled it down a little.

  ‘Obviously, DS Xiu was there as well,’ he’d said.

  Sullivan had nodded in Xiu’s direction. ‘Yes, of course. Good work, Sara.’

  ‘But I was the one who chased him. And I hurt my leg . . . ’

  Now, as soon as Sullivan had called the briefing to order, he made sure everyone understood that the time for backslapping had passed. That despite the sterling efforts of two of his officers, said ruthless killer was still out there and that their investigation was very much ongoing.

  ‘Absolutely, sir,’ Xiu said.

  ‘Bang on,’ Clough said.

  ‘The knee’s a bit better today,’ Miller said. ‘Thanks for asking.’

  Sullivan looked to DS Andrea Fuller. ‘So, where are we vis-à-vis the sweep of local guesthouses and the like?’

  ‘Well, we’re still . . . sweeping,’ Fuller said. ‘But it’s quite a job. There are nearly three thousand bed spaces in local three- and four-star hotels—’

  Miller cut in. ‘Like I said before, Draper will have gone for something a bit more cheap and not very cheerful. Somewhere scuzzy, so he doesn’t stick out.’

  ‘Agreed, but there’s another ninety-odd thousand beds available in the small guesthouses and B&Bs and that’s presuming he isn’t staying somewhere a bit further out.’

  ‘We’re going to need a bigger brush,’ Clough said.

  Everyone stared at him.

  ‘For sweeping, you know, like in Jaws.’ Clough loosened his tie. ‘Only that was a boat, so . . . ’

  Sullivan glared at the one member of the team who made him feel better about his own capabilities, then turned back to Fuller. ‘So, how are you and Tony going about it?’

  ‘Well, we started by compiling a list,’ Clough said, quickly. ‘Like you said, sir. Then we emailed every establishment on it, with a photograph of Draper and an urgent request for an immediate response, whether they recognised Draper or not, so we could cross them off the list.’

  ‘We didn’t get many responses,’ Fuller said.

  ‘No.’ Clough looked sheepish. ‘Not many.’

  Xiu nodded. ‘Spam folders.’

  ‘Right.’ Fuller stared at Clough. ‘I did say that’s what would happen, didn’t I? A lot of email clients will automatically divert mass mailings into a spam folder . . . so, we then sent every email again, individually.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘That’s a day I’m never going to get back.’

  ‘We still didn’t get replies from everyone, though,’ Clough said.

  ‘Not even close,’ Fuller said.

  Xiu looked horrified. ‘Why wouldn’t members of the public reply to an urgent request from the police?’

  ‘Because they can’t be arsed,’ Miller said. ‘You’d be amazed how many people can’t be arsed. Some might not have seen it, granted, or just forgotten to reply . . . but my money’s on not being arsed.’

  Xiu was thinking about it. ‘I think a more likely explanation is that a lot of them will have thought it was bogus. Doesn’t matter how official it looks, a lot of people will see something asking them to call a number and presume it’s a phishing email.’

  ‘Bang on.’ Clough nodded. ‘I got one from the FBI once saying I was being investigated because I’d accessed “illegal websites”. It looked kosher but when I called the number it turned out to be a scam.’

  Everyone looked at him.

  ‘You called the number?’ Miller was grinning.

  ‘I just wanted to make sure, didn’t I?’

  ‘Anyway . . . ’ Fuller sighed. ‘There are still hundreds of places we haven’t had a response from and bearing in mind the number of properties we’re dealing with, we don’t have enough manpower to go knocking on doors. So it’s phone calls initially, and if there is anything that sounds like a possibility and the proprietor in question hasn’t already seen Draper’s photograph in one of the local papers, we send them one. No luck so far, but we’ve barely scratched the surface.’

  Sullivan sighed, staring down at his iPad as though it might provide some much-needed inspiration. Or perhaps he just had a cheery screensaver of some flowers or a nice kitten. ‘Well, until someone comes up with a better idea . . . keep scratching.’

  ‘Sir?’ Xiu raised a hand.

  ‘You don’t have to put your hand up, Sara,’ Sullivan said. ‘This isn’t a classroom.’

  Miller thought that if it had been, Sullivan would be a supply teacher at best, a PE teacher at that, but it always amused him that Xiu stuck her arm in the air like that. He’d have put money on her being head girl at school, a prefect for sure. They did have prefects at Miller’s school – not that he was ever in the running – but they were no better than adolescent gangland enforcers, demanding dinner money with menaces on behalf of feared head prefect Graham Trotter. Thanks to a winning combination of slyness and funny voices, Miller had managed largely to avoid the painful attentions of Trotter’s bum-fluffed henchmen, but his friend Imran had been on the receiving end of a great many dead legs and Chinese burns.

  Miller guessed that Xiu would have been a rather more wise and benevolent dictator.

  ‘Could we not draft in some extra officers?’ she asked. ‘This is a major inquiry, after all.’

  ‘I have been trying,’ Sullivan said. ‘DCI Akers is doing her best, but as of now we’ll have to manage with the officers we’ve got.’

  ‘Maybe we could suggest some kind of transfer scenario with another team,’ Miller said. ‘We give them DC Clough and they give us . . . I don’t know, a couple of cadets or a lolli­pop lady.’

  ‘You cheeky sod,’ Clough said.

  ‘Better yet, we just . . . give them DC Clough.’

  ‘This isn’t helping,’ Sullivan said.

  Miller nodded upwards. ‘What about DCI Forgeham’s team? They must have a few spare officers knocking about, because they’re doing less than nothing with their own investigation.’ He looked around the table, but with the exception of Xiu nobody would meet his eye, all well aware exactly which investigation he was referring to.

  Sullivan cleared his throat and stabbed at his iPad. ‘Right, well, let’s get back to it. Goes without saying, but anyone who’s free to give Andrea and Tony a hand phone-bashing, please muck in. The apprehension of Dennis Draper remains this team’s number one priority. Is that understood? Before anyone else is harmed.’

  There were murmurs of assent and words of determination and commitment from almost everyone gathered.

  This time, it was Miller who stared down at the table.

  Half an hour later and Miller could well understand Andrea Fuller’s frustration. Ten minutes after that, he was about ready to throttle himself with the phone cord. At the conclusion of his umpteenth fruitless conversation with the owner of a guesthouse, during which the closest he’d got to anyone matching Draper’s description was one individual who ‘looked a bit shifty’ and another who’d ‘nicked a kettle’, Miller looked up to see Xiu standing at his desk.

  ‘I was thinking about this briefcase,’ she said.

  For the next few seconds, Miller pretended to be busy with something and tried not to appear nervous. He knew that his failure to tell Draper exactly where the briefcase was (far beyond his reach in some evidence locker) could not possibly have been lost on Xiu. He was grateful that she had thus far not mentioned it to him or – as far as he knew – anyone else. Of course, if his decision backfired and Draper’s hunt for a case he was never going to find resulted in any more deaths, Xiu might not be quite so magnanimous, but as of now he had to believe he was getting away with it.

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘I don’t see why Draper would still be looking for it.’

  So, maybe he hadn’t got away with it at all. Maybe Xiu was about to give him an even stiffer dressing down than the one Alex had given him the night before. The one he’d given himself.

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘It’s been what . . . a week since he chopped those hands off? Maybe more, because we don’t actually know when he . . . ’

  ‘Did the chopping.’

  ‘Right. So, those hands will be in an advanced state of decomposition by now. Reeking to high heaven I would have thought.’

  ‘OK, so we’ve got a briefcase with stinky hands in.’

  ‘Seriously smelly.’

  ‘I still don’t get your point.’

  Xiu perched on the edge of his desk. ‘Draper thinks that Bagnall gave the case to someone else, right?’

  ‘Which he did,’ Miller said.

  ‘Of course, but Draper doesn’t know that someone was you. He doesn’t know the police have got it.’

  Only because I chose not to tell him. ‘Go on.’

  ‘He’s got to presume that whoever’s in possession of the case has opened it, and that any normal person, as soon as they’d done that, would go straight to the police. Once they’d been sick, obviously.’

  ‘Unless Draper believes that Bagnall told this fictitious someone not to open the case. Told them to stash it somewhere.’

  ‘Yes, that’s a possibility . . . except that this case, which in your scenario Draper believes has been hidden under a bed or on top of a wardrobe or wherever, would be stinking the place out by now. Right?’