Clough finally realised Miller was standing there and looked suitably shamefaced.

  ‘Well, this is me,’ Miller said. ‘At least it used to be me.’

  Clough moved as fast as Miller had ever seen him. On his feet and gathering up his things like it was going-home time or someone had announced they were giving pies away.

  ‘Sorry, Dec, here you go . . . I mean, nobody said, so we weren’t . . . you know.’

  Miller shrugged, like it wasn’t a big deal. ‘Jump in my grave as quick, would you, Tone?’

  The blood drained from Clough’s face and they just stared at each other for a few seconds, nodding like idiots. Miller felt a bit guilty, because he certainly could have said something that would have made the man feel less uncomfortable. Actually, he couldn’t think of much that would have made him any more uncomfortable, but that’s what had popped into Miller’s head, so that’s what came out of his mouth.

  That’s how it tended to be.

  As Clough stalked away in search of a different desk, Miller made himself back at home. He shifted the computer screen round an inch or two and whistled for a bit. He adjusted the height of the chair, opened and closed a few drawers then noticed some godawful gonk thing that Clough had left behind and lobbed it into the bin.

  He looked up to see DS Andrea Fuller hovering.

  Miller reckoned that, himself aside, Fuller was probably the smartest copper on the team and, if she wasn’t, she certainly had the shortest fuse. He knew her parents were knocking on a bit and that she had to take care of them on top of the Job, so it was understandable that she got somewhat . . . frazzled sometimes. They once had an argument about whether wearing only socks counted as being naked and things had got a bit heated.

  She’d been wrong, obviously.

  ‘Boss wants a word,’ she said.

  Miller sat back and held out his arms, but he could see that a simple gesture of disbelief wasn’t going to be enough. ‘Andrea, you know when people use the word “literally” and you want to punch them, because they don’t really mean literally?’

  She just grunted and Miller could tell by the way she rolled her eyes how thrilled she was that he was back.

  ‘Like, there were literally a million people in the pub. No, there almost certainly weren’t. He was literally pissing himself laughing. No, I think you’ll find he wasn’t. Well, I have literally been here two minutes. Literally. So how the hell can I be in trouble already?’

  Andrea grunted again and threw in a shrug for good measure. ‘I think you’ve just got a gift.’

  He knocked and bowled straight through DCI Susan Akers’s door before she had a chance to say ‘come in’. Using the same long-perfected tactic, he sat down before he was invited. He knew it would be fine, because even though Akers was his boss, they’d known each other a long time and were close. Well, as close as you could be to someone you were inordinately fond of, but who was also well capable of scaring you half to death whenever she fancied it.

  Whenever you . . . whenever he messed up.

  ‘Balloons would probably have been a bit much,’ he said. ‘I get that, but a cake would have been nice. Not a massive cake, I mean not the kind of cake someone could jump out of. Well, maybe a child or a very small person. That sort of size. I mean, now I think about it, any sort of cake was unlikely, bearing in mind nobody knew I was coming in. But there’s still time, if anyone fancies making the gesture. That’s all I’m saying. I promise I’ll act surprised.’

  He grinned at her, but Akers stayed stony-faced.

  ‘Have you finished, Detective Sergeant?’

  He pretended that he was thinking about it, then leaned forward to pluck a dead leaf from the potted plant on her desk. It looked nasty. ‘Grey mould.’ He shook his head to let her know just how nasty it was. ‘You need to keep an eye on that.’

  ‘What the hell are you doing here?’

  ‘Oh my God. I must have missed it!’

  ‘Missed what?’

  He grabbed the newspaper that was sitting on her desk and began leafing quickly through it. ‘You know, crime being . . . over. Is it in here somewhere? I didn’t hear anything on the radio. I mean that’s fantastic news, obviously. So what are you going to do, now none of us are needed any more? You and your missus will have plenty of time for the amateur dramatics now, and the golf, so it’s a win-win when you think about it . . .’

  He stopped because, even though he was not always great at taking a hint, on this occasion Miller could see very clearly that she wasn’t remotely charmed or amused. Best to cut his losses, he reckoned.

  Best to tell the truth.

  ‘I was bored, Susan. Fair enough?’

  ‘It’s only been six weeks.’

  ‘I know exactly how long it’s been.’

  ‘That’s not enough time. You were given twice that long.’

  ‘Rattling around in that house—’

  ‘That’s not a good enough reason—’

  ‘I need to work.’ He looked at her, made sure she knew he meant it. ‘I need to do something.’

  He let his head drop back for a few seconds, and when he lifted it again the DCI was straightening papers on her desk. It was probably an effort to distract herself from wanting to throw something at him. He saw her look past him and he didn’t need to turn round to know that people in the incident room were watching through the big window of her office.

  ‘Look, don’t get me wrong, Dec,’ she said. ‘Nobody’s more delighted than I am to see you’re doing better.’

  ‘Me,’ he said. ‘I’m more delighted.’

  ‘But it’s still my job to see that this team runs efficiently and that means all officers doing their jobs properly. I know you think you’re up to it, but . . .’ She looked at him and he saw her eyes close for a second or two which was usually a sign that he was wearing her down. He tried not to do anything too obvious like cheer or punch the air. ‘OK, but I’ll need to re-jig things a bit.’

  Unable to resist it, he turned to give the incident room audience a thumbs-up.

  ‘Clough and Fuller are a team now,’ she said. ‘So I’ll have to find someone else to pair you up with. I could put you with the officer who came across to replace you, but that would be cruel and unusual punishment.’ She left a beat, which he thought was impressive. ‘For them, obviously.’

  ‘Obviously,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll have a word with DI Sullivan, see what he thinks.’

  That pissed on Miller’s chips, somewhat. ‘Sullivan’s a DI?’

  ‘Came through last month.’

  ‘Honestly, you turn your back for five minutes and everything turns to shit.’ Tim Sullivan’s promotion was genuinely bad news, but seeing Susan working to suppress a smile made him feel a little better.

  ‘Leave it with me, Dec,’ she said.

  Miller stood up to leave but stopped at the door. ‘I’m serious, by the way.’ He pointed to her sorry-looking plant. ‘Grey mould. Botrytis. Nasty if you don’t sort it. Just remove the infected bits, do something about your ventilation and you’ll be right as ninepence. See, Susan?’

  Akers pulled a face, like she knew she’d regret asking. ‘What?’

  ‘Back on the job less than an hour and I’ve already saved a life. To be honest, I don’t know how you’ve managed without me.’

  THREE

  It was true that Miller wanted to be busy, but he hadn’t been counting on picking up such a big case on his first day back. That was the way things went, though. You were desperate for a day or two to catch your breath or even just looking to recharge your batteries after a major inquiry and someone decided to poison their husband or stab a passer-by because they didn’t like their trainers.

  People were so bloody inconsiderate, sometimes.

  Before that though, before he’d caught the aforementioned case, he’d needed the rest of the team to know where he was at. He’d needed to lay down a marker and let everyone know that they could relax.

  He was forced into it, really.

  After his meeting with DCI Akers, he’d spent an hour or so at his computer, looking through the squad’s open cases, trying to see if there was an inquiry he could easily slot into. It was hard to concentrate though, because every time he so much as glanced up or went to make himself tea, he was aware that he was still being . . . studied. He’d catch Tony Clough or one of the others staring and whenever he did, there was always that irritating, sickly smile or even worse the annoying slow nod.

  It was tense and awkward and it was starting to get on Miller’s nerves.

  After one too many sympathetic cocks of the head, he’d had enough and found himself standing up and clambering a little awkwardly on to his desk, then clinking a spoon against an empty mug until he had everyone’s attention.

  Found himself, because that was the way it went a lot of the time. Impetuous was probably the polite word for it. He would do something or say something and five minutes later – if someone was to ask him why he’d done such and such or made that stupid/inappropriate/offensive comment – he wouldn’t be able to come up with much beyond feeling strongly that it had been the right thing to do at the time. That was usually all he had. The right thing, despite all available evidence and expert opinion pointing to the fact that it was very much the wrong thing. Miller did not make any apologies for who he was. Well . . . sometimes he had to.

  So, desk, mug, clink-clink with the spoon . . .

  All heads turned and it went very quiet.

  ‘OK, well . . . thank you all for coming.’ He manufactured that smile he’d been practising in the mirror before leaving the house. ‘I’ll try to keep this brief because we’ve all got crimes to solve . . . alcohol habits to support, gambling debts to pay off, whatever. So, just to say, my wife Alex, who some of you knew, is dead. She’s . . . dead. It’s a pisser, but there you are.

  ‘Obviously, if you knew her, you’re well aware of the fact that she’s dead and you might well have been at the funeral, so I could probably have skipped that bit . . . but I suppose what I really want to say is . . . I’m dealing with it and if I am, then you lot should.’

  He stared down at the shocked faces and momentarily lost his thread a little.

  ‘Also. Be dealing with it.’

  Miller looked across and saw that Susan Akers had moved to the window of her office and was watching along with everyone else. He was trying to keep it light, which had become even more of a default position lately, and he’d thought he was doing a decent job of it.

  Still, she looked upset.

  ‘So, there’s really no need to creep around or lower your voices or have that expression like I’ve got cancer, and please don’t put your hand on my shoulder and give it a little squeeze of condolence. God, I hate that. If you do, I might well have to break a couple of your fingers and at the very least you’ll get a nasty Chinese burn, so please don’t say I didn’t warn you . . .’

  He paused and looked around to make sure everyone had got the message. There were a good many blank stares, but it wasn’t like he’d been expecting a round of applause, so he decided they would have to do.

  ‘I’m just saying, shit happens and we’ve all got jobs to do, so just . . . get over it. OK? Right then, thank you so much for your attention. As you were.’

  There were a few long seconds of very stunned silence when he’d finished, before people began muttering and started to drift back to work and Miller tried to climb down off the desk.

  It was a lot harder than climbing up.

  When a hand reached up to help, he happily grabbed it, then, once he had both feet back on the floor, he stood staring at the woman to whom the hand belonged as it began shaking his.

  ‘Thanks very much,’ he said. ‘Who the hell are you?’

  She was somewhere in her early thirties, had short dark hair and was, he guessed, of Chinese descent. Guessed, because making a presumption about such things was always dodgy, not least because you could end up looking like someone who was not culturally sensitive.

  Or just a pillock.

  He glanced down at the ID on her lanyard, wondering if he should apologise for the Chinese burn thing, and he was about to have a bash at her surname when she saved him the trouble.

  ‘I’m DS Sara Xiu.’

  ‘Right, like . . . jus.’

  She blinked then said her name again. They were still shaking hands.

  ‘Like the stuff you get in fancy restaurants, you know? Jus. I mean, it’s basically just posh gravy, if you ask me.’ Miller smiled, pleased with it. ‘Maybe I should call you “Posh Gravy”.’

  ‘Why would you do that?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Hmm.’ She let go of his hand.

  ‘It’s just a daft nickname—’

  ‘I’m your replacement,’ she said. ‘Well, I was.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Sorry about that.’

  ‘It looks like we’re going to be teaming up.’

  ‘Even sorrier.’

  She smiled. ‘That’s a joke, right?’

  ‘Not really.’

  She carried on smiling and then she started nodding, which was when Tim Sullivan – now, sadly, DI Tim Sullivan – marched out of Akers’s office and shouted across.

  ‘Miller, Xiu, you’re up . . .’

  Miller looked at Xiu. ‘What are you, cursed?’

  They walked across to where Sullivan was still talking to someone on his phone. He paused his call to give them their instructions, the voice even more nasal and grating than Miller remembered.

  ‘Suspicious death at the Sands Hotel, so get yourselves over there and see what’s what. I’ll be fifteen minutes behind you.’

  ‘Sir,’ Xiu said.

  Miller’s new partner was clearly raring to go and he watched her hurry across to a desk and gather up her things. He waited for her at the door, staring expectantly at a couple of his fellow officers as they wandered past. He held out his arms.

  ‘So, definitely no cake, then?’

  Nobody, least of all Miller himself, would have claimed he was the world’s most natural driver.

  He could do it when he needed to, obviously, and workwise he’d done the compulsory highspeed chase training and all the surveillance courses. With the day-to-day stuff, though, the getting from A to B, he was not always as confident as you needed to be behind the wheel. He could lack a little focus, sometimes, he was well aware of that, and was just as likely to be thinking about why a particular blood-spatter pattern looked like an elephant or how on earth Scotch eggs are made as he was about the lights changing up ahead or the driver in front of him slowing down. He was easily distracted. All in all, it was safer for him, and a whole lot safer for everyone else, for Miller to do as little driving as possible.

  Which is why, when they got to the assigned pool car – a Honda something-or-other – and Xiu climbed into the driver’s seat, he wasn’t about to argue.

  She started the car then turned to him.

  ‘I’m sorry about your wife,’ she said.

  There was no sympathetic tilt of the head or soppy smile. She just said it quietly, like it was a statement of fact.

  ‘Not as sorry as I am,’ Miller said.

  Xiu just stared at him, but Miller wasn’t bothered because it happened a lot. He gave it a few more seconds, just to see if she had anything further to add, then nodded towards the car park exit. ‘Come on, Posh, let’s get a shift on. This murder isn’t going to solve itself.’

  FOUR

  Pippa Shepherd had not slept well.

  She’d been wide awake since the early hours – rigid and unblinking under clammy sheets or curled around a pillow fighting back the tears – before eventually giving up and dragging herself downstairs just after five-thirty. She hadn’t bothered getting dressed, because she couldn’t see the point. Instead, she’d sat in her neat and tidy living room and watched the sun come up like it couldn’t care less, then let the bright and breezy noises of morning TV slop over her while she’d drunk a lot more tea than anyone needed and made the same phone call every few minutes.

  Now, she reached for the phone again and hit the redial button.

  ‘I’m sorry, but I’m not around to take your call . . .’

  Telling herself she was being stupid and over-dramatic really didn’t help, not for very long anyway, but she kept doing it all the same. What else could she do? She was an idiot and she was panicking for no good reason and why did she always have to dwell on the worst case scenario? A doom-monger, wasn’t that what Barry always called her?

  After all, there were any number of reasons why . . .

  One reason, there was one . . . and much as she told herself not to think about that, it was impossible to think of anything else. Like trying to kid herself she wasn’t hungry when she was actually ravenous. The feeling that she knew would be so much worse than anything she was going through right then; the pain, for which this was only a rehearsal.

  Empty, hopeless and done with. Dead inside.

  She dialled again, held her breath while she listened, then threw the phone across the room as soon as his recorded voice had repeated that same pointless apology.

  ‘I’m sorry . . .’

  She got up and scampered to retrieve her phone, quickly hanging up the call so the line was free in case he called and setting it back down on the arm of the chair.

  She let her breath settle.

  A minute later, or maybe fifteen, she found herself drifting slowly back to the kitchen for more tea, staring around the room like she didn’t recognise it, then stopping when she caught sight of the bottle she’d all but emptied the night before. Drinking and dialling as the evening had crawled by. The anxiety turning to dread.