Cutler stared at the man’s unsettling display of teeth. He definitely preferred the depressed greyhound to the smiling one. ‘I don’t think I follow you.’

  ‘Come on, Mr Cutler. The money for the job. Ten thousand pounds which, seeing as you were brought straight here from the railway station, I’m guessing you still have on you.’ Draper glanced across at the bedside cupboard. ‘Or somewhere nearby, anyway.’

  ‘If you’re talking about any previous arrangement we might have had,’ Cutler said, ‘I’m really not sure it applies any more.’

  Draper inched his chair forward. ‘But I did him, Mr Cutler. You know I did him.’

  Cutler reached to plump his pillow, at least as much as the half-arsed excuse for a pillow could be plumped. ‘Do I, though, Dennis? I know George Panaides is dead, but how do I know that’s down to you? He might have been hit by a bus.’

  ‘But I blew the back of his bleedin’ head off, Mr Cutler. It was in the Gazette.’

  ‘We had a deal, Dennis. I was there with the money in good faith and now look where I am.’ He gently lifted his sling. ‘See? I’m not going to be playing table tennis any time soon, am I?’

  ‘I didn’t know you played table tennis.’

  ‘It’s just an expression.’ Cutler groaned and laid his arm back across his chest.

  ‘Yeah, well I’m sorry about your injury and that.’ Draper looked depressed again. ‘But it weren’t really my fault—’

  Cutler leaned forward fast, then took a few deep breaths until he was sure he wasn’t going to throw up again. ‘Not your fault? I wouldn’t sodding well be in hospital at all if you could keep your chopper in your pants.’

  Draper winced, his hand absently moving to cradle his crotch.

  Cutler smiled. ‘How is it down there, by the way?’

  ‘Stitches come out next week.’

  Cutler winced. ‘Look, it’s all very unfortunate, Dennis, but without the agreed proof, I don’t cough up. Get the briefcase back and then we’ll talk. Fair enough?’

  The look on Draper’s face told him that he didn’t think it was very fair at all.

  ‘It’s your own fault, Dennis. You’ve got to put your . . . tendencies on hold when you’re working.’

  ‘My tendencies aren’t any of your business.’

  ‘Under normal circumstances, definitely not. Under normal circumstances, I couldn’t give a monkey’s what you get up to or where or with who, but bearing in mind our current situation, I reckon you’ve made them my business. Wouldn’t you say?’

  Draper had clearly heard enough. He stood up, threw back the curtain and strode away, grumbling. Striding was evidently not wholly straightforward given his delicate condition genital-wise, but he did the best he could.

  Cutler shouted after him. ‘I wasn’t sure you were the right man for this in the first place, but a mate recommended you. When he said you were a whizz at a hand job, I thought he was on about how good you were with a hacksaw!’

  The old man in the next bed began whimpering again.

  ‘And you can pipe down an’ all . . . ’

  Draper slammed the car door, put both hands on the wheel and took a deep breath. The Cutlers were on the slide, everybody said so. When he’d got this briefcase business sorted out, he’d be back for them. For the top man, at least. He put the car in gear and rolled away towards the car park barrier and out on to the main road. A tosspot in a Cavalier cut him up, but Draper decided to leave it.

  He had some serious thinking to do.

  He thought about the bloke who’d been standing next to him at the urinal a few hours before. The one in the Hawaiian shirt. He’d clearly been in on it. Draper gently adjusted his trousers and smiled, because he thought he knew where to start looking for him. Back in those toilets, he’d obviously had an eyeful of the bloke’s tackle, but he’d also got a good look at his hands.

  Draper knew all about hands and he knew that what he’d seen under that lad’s fingernails had been motor oil.

  FOUR

  Once he’d fed Fred and Ginger, Miller sat in the kitchen, eating poached eggs on toast and listening to a phone-in show on the radio. Listening . . . up to the point he felt compelled to join in. Engaging with the discussion in a way that, for Miller, was both cathartic and emotionally uplifting.

  ‘I tell you one of the questions that I can never get my head round, Steve . . . keeps me awake at night, this one.’

  ‘I’m listening, Jason.’

  ‘We evolved from monkeys, right? So why are there still monkeys?’

  Miller growled, his mouth full. ‘When you say we evolved . . . ’

  ‘You know, chimps and that.’

  ‘Well, to begin with, chimps aren’t actually monkeys, Jason.’

  ‘Ha, suck on that, you dipstick!’

  ‘Be that as it may though, you’re not actually thinking about evolution in the right way. It’s more that we shared a common ancestor.’

  ‘So, like my great, great, great, great, great . . . whatever grandad was a chimp—?’

  ‘No, not a chimp. Try thinking more in terms of cousins . . . ’

  ‘Yeah, think about cousins, Jason. Think about what happens when they marry. Like your mum and dad . . . ’

  Miller loaded the dishwasher then ambled into the living room. He caught sight of himself in the mirror and thought about what Akers had said about him looking tired. He stood for a minute, peering at his reflection and was forced to concede that she had a point. His gaze dropped down to the picture of Alex next to the TV, looking amazing in one of the competition frocks her sister had made.

  ‘I don’t think you look tired.’

  Miller turned to see Alex perched on the edge of the sofa. ‘Obviously not, because you love me to bits and think I’m devastatingly handsome.’

  ‘You are devastatingly handsome.’

  ‘Who am I to argue?’

  ‘But also because I’m not actually here and you’re just imagining me saying nice things to you.’

  Miller walked across and dropped onto the sofa next to her. He reached for the TV remote. ‘Yeah . . . it’s very much a minor perk, but you being dead is doing wonders for my ego.’ He flicked through the TV channels and settled for an episode of Gogglebox because, if there was one thing more satisfying than shouting at the telly, it was shouting at people on the telly who were shouting at the telly themselves.

  ‘I did say nice things to you before I was dead,’ Alex said.

  ‘Yeah,’ Miller said. ‘You did.’

  Miller watched for a while. The posh, middle-aged couple who had silly nicknames for each other were suitably disturbed by an episode of Embarrassing Bodies.

  He said, ‘I wonder how your old boss is coping with today’s disaster.’

  Alex shrugged. ‘Bob Perks is old enough and ugly enough to handle it, and it’s not like there haven’t been cock-ups before. Not when I was working there, obviously.’

  ‘Course not,’ Miller said. ‘Unthinkable.’

  ‘Besides which, it is pretty funny.’ Alex laughed. ‘Toiletgate . . . ’

  It had been funny to begin with, the details at least. Like a bad Benny Hill sketch (which wasn’t to suggest there had ever been any good ones). A few hours on, though, Miller was less inclined to see the lighter side of a botched operation which had seen Wayne Cutler escape what sounded like an iron-clad ‘conspiracy to murder’ charge with nothing worse than a bang on the head.

  ‘Did Bob Perks know who you were meeting that night?’ Miller turned to look at his wife. The man who’d called her from an untraceable number a few minutes before she fled a dance competition. The man who had almost certainly shot her dead shortly afterwards.

  Alex said nothing.

  It was usually the way it went when they were discussing anything remotely . . . difficult. When Miller was asking questions he didn’t already know the answer to. ‘I mean, I’ve got to presume not, because otherwise he’d definitely have said something to the investigation. Right?’

  Alex looked at the floor.

  DCI Lindsey Forgeham, who was leading the investigation into Alex’s murder, had certainly spoken to everyone Alex worked with. Miller remained deeply irritated that many of Alex’s old colleagues at S&O seemed to know more about what Forgeham’s team was up to than he did. It wasn’t altogether surprising considering that, because of his close personal connection to the victim, he was not allowed anywhere near the investigation himself. Being told to stay away still rankled nevertheless.

  It had to be said that Miller was rankled by a great many things (snotty doctor’s receptionists, the bloke next door who always used the wrong bin, people starting a sentence with ‘So,’) but being warned off anything was number one in a carefully curated list of things that seriously cheesed him off.

  Top of the rankle-rankings.

  ‘Are you ever going to hand over those photos?’ Alex asked.

  Now it was Miller’s turn to study the carpet.

  ‘The video . . . ?’

  Miller’s mobile rang.

  ‘Hey, Miller . . . ’

  ‘Hey, Finn . . . ’

  Miller turned, but Alex was gone, which wasn’t much of a shock. Finn was Alex’s daughter, the child of a marriage that had ended when Finn’s father – a violent, hardcore drug addict – had overdosed. When Finn was sixteen and showing the same addictive and disruptive tendencies as her father, Alex had kicked her out of the house. It had, without question, been an extremely difficult decision and Alex had been haunted by the choice she’d made until the day she died.

  ‘I’m a good copper and a terrible mother.’

  ‘No you’re not.’

  ‘Not what? Which one aren’t I?’

  ‘Give me a minute . . . ’

  Bad jokes, comfort, whatever. Miller had done his best to help his wife cope with the ravages of the guilt.

  Finn had lived on the streets of Blackpool for more than ten years now, begging for the money she needed to feed herself in every sense. Through all that time – the decade of Miller’s marriage to Finn’s mother and the months since Miller had become a widower – she had been Miller’s eyes and ears on the streets. The information she provided was not always useful, but it gave Miller a reason to hand over money and it gave Finn a reason to take it.

  He tried to give her advice which was more often than not ignored.

  He asked her to move in with him, but she always refused.

  He would never dream of saying as much to the girl herself, but it didn’t take a genius to figure out he was trying to be the father she’d never really had.

  ‘I need a favour,’ Finn said.

  ‘You been nicked again?’ There’d been a fair bit of that over the years. A quiet word with a beat officer or two; a nod and a wink and a couple of pints to smooth things over.

  ‘It’s for a friend, actually.’

  Miller could hear the buzzes and bells of an arcade, the screams of the fairground. The Pleasure Beach was a good place to scrounge up enough for dinner if you were lucky. ‘What friend?’

  ‘He’s just a lad I get a bit of weed from sometimes.’

  ‘You’re asking me to do a favour for a drug dealer? You do know that’s frowned upon in my line of work?’

  ‘He’s not a dealer, he just lends me a bit now and again. He’s a good bloke, I swear, but he’s got himself into a bit of a mess and when I told him I was close to a detective, he asked if you might be able to help him. That’s all.’

  ‘Close?’

  ‘Don’t get soppy, Miller.’

  Miller smiled. ‘What kind of a mess?’

  ‘He wouldn’t tell me, but he’s seriously scared.’

  Finn sounded rattled herself and that didn’t happen often. Whatever state her friend was in, it was clearly upsetting her.

  ‘Yeah, all right. I can’t promise to help him, but I don’t suppose it can hurt to find out what’s—’

  ‘Great, because he’s outside your place right now.’

  ‘What?’

  Finn hung up and, thirty seconds later, Miller’s doorbell rang.

  FIVE

  The young man skulking on Miller’s doorstep was in his mid-twenties; the same sort of age as Finn. He was a big lad, though there was rather more fat than muscle and it appeared to weigh heavily on him in more ways than one. The essentially harmless type, Miller decided, who’d have been the bully’s mate at school, as opposed to actually being the bully himself.

  ‘I’m Andy,’ he said, proffering a hand. ‘Bagnall.’ A broad Lancashire accent.

  Looking at the nervous smile that broke across the boy’s soft, round face, Miller decided that he was wrong and that his visitor was far more likely to have been the one getting bullied. Miller knew a little about that. During his own schooldays, his best friend Imran had been on the receiving end often enough. To this day, Miller wished he’d done a bit more to protect him.

  ‘Right.’ Miller shook the boy’s hand. ‘You’d best come in, then.’

  If the lad was as scared as Finn had said, he certainly wasn’t keeping a low profile appearance-wise. The baseball cap did little to hide the bleached-blond ponytail, and skin-tight jeans with cowboy boots were not the wisest choice if you wanted to be inconspicuous. He was wearing a shirt that wasn’t as much loud as deafening and a denim waistcoat which – Miller saw when the boy moved past him into the house – had an enormous stars-and-stripes-coloured eagle embroidered on the back.

  He was probably visible from Huddersfield.

  Having processed the boy’s fashion choices, Miller couldn’t fail to clock the black briefcase he was clutching. He thought about the story Akers had told him a few hours earlier and began to understand what was making Andy Bagnall so nervous. Miller watched him set the case down gently on the carpet once he’d perched on the edge of the sofa and taken a deep breath.

  ‘You want some tea?’

  ‘No, I’m good, thanks.’ The boy was staring at the playpen that took up nearly half of Miller’s front room. Fred was standing on her hind legs pushing her nose through the bars while Ginger scampered around in the wheel. ‘Rats,’ Andy said. ‘Nice . . . ’

  Miller sat down opposite him. ‘Yeah, I think so. Not everyone’s quite so keen.’

  ‘Remember that old Michael Jackson song, “Ben”? That was about a rat, did you know that? It’s from a movie, I think. Back when he was good, you know, before all the plastic surgery.’

  ‘And the business with the kids.’

  ‘So, what . . . you’re Finn’s stepdad or something?’

  ‘Something,’ Miller said. He looked at the briefcase, then saw Andy look at it. It was clearly what the boy had come to talk about, but Miller sensed that he might need easing into it a little. ‘Finn’s obviously told you what a top-notch detective I am—’

  ‘Well, she said you were a detective.’

  ‘Which means you won’t be surprised to hear I’m getting the distinct impression that you’re a fan of all things American. Baseball and doughnuts and whatever.’

  ‘Yeah, I love it. Well, I mean, not everything.’

  ‘Quite right,’ Miller said. ‘The bacon’s rubbish and the cheese. And they can’t do chocolate for toffee. Or toffee come to that. So, what’s your favourite part?’

  Andy looked a little embarrassed. ‘I’ve never actually been, tell you the truth. I want to, like . . . and when I’ve saved up enough money . . . ’ He glanced down at the briefcase, which Miller guessed had been the latest in a long line of failed attempts to get enough cash together for a plane ticket stateside.

  ‘Right, so let’s talk about—’

  ‘New York, L.A., Chicago . . . ’ Andy leaned forward, excited; counting off on his fingers the places he wanted to visit. ‘Detroit, Miami, San Francisco obviously because that’s where Sam Spade works. All the places I’ve seen in the movies or read about.’

  ‘What kind of books do you read?’

  ‘Crime and cops, you know . . . thrillers!’ Now Andy was warming to his theme. ‘Serial killers, gangsters, spies, anything. I don’t really mind as long as it’s set in America, with all American cars and guns and food and that. Only thing I’m not mad about is cosy stuff.’

  ‘Cosy, like crumpets and slippers?’

  ‘Cats and libraries and vicars and what have you. I prefer a bit more murder and mayhem.’

  ‘Right . . . ’

  ‘Do you read?’

  ‘Well, not as such.’ Miller didn’t think that Why Walk When You Can Quickstep? – A Ballroom and Latin Dance Practice Journal would sound very impressive. ‘I quite liked that one about the girl on the train, mind you. What was that called?’

  ‘The Girl on the Train.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s the one. Actually it was my wife who read it, but it sounded pretty good . . . but I don’t think you came round to chat about starting a book club, so let’s talk about the briefcase.’ Miller nodded down to the case. ‘That’s what you’re so scared about, right?’

  Andy sat back and closed his eyes for a few seconds. It was as though his enthusiasm for crime on the page had temporarily taken his mind off the unpleasant ramifications of the real stuff. Now he swallowed hard, and though Miller thought he was trying not to show it, his lively imagination was clearly conjuring up what some of those ramifications might be. ‘Well, yeah . . . I’m a bit nervous, definitely.’

  ‘Does your mate know you’re here?’

  Andy sniffed. ‘What mate?’

  Miller sighed. ‘Come on, lad. I know there were two of you at the station, so let’s not waste any time. What’s his name?’

  Andy thought about, then shook his head. ‘I’d rather not drop him in it, if that’s OK. I mean, it doesn’t make any difference, does it?’