ou're not kidding. I couldn't even argue, not with the kids there. She stood in the hall, telling them Daddy has to go away for a few days because of work. And that look on her face, like she was daring me to contradict her."

Paula shook her head, trying to imagine what that must have felt like and failing. "So what did you do?"

"I picked up my bags and walked. Got in the car and drove around for a bit. I just couldn't get my head round it, you know? I tried phoning Lindy, but she wasn't picking up. I parked up and I just wandered round the city centre. Then I called you." He picked up his glass and drained the remaining half-pint in one.

"I'm so sorry, Don."

"Me too, Paula." He picked up the fresh bottle and poured it carefully into his glass, watching intently as the beer cleared and formed a head.

"Do you know what brought it on?"

He made a wordless noise in the back of his throat. "What always brings it on for cops?"

"The job," Paula said heavily.

"The job," Merrick agreed. "You know what it's been like the past few weeks. We've been working all hours, then having a pint to unwind, because you need a space. You can't go home till you've put a bit of distance between you and the day, otherwise you just trail the shit in behind you. And when you do go home, it's the cold shoulder. Either that or it's, "You're never here, you never see the kids, you've no idea what it's like trying to cope with everything, I might as well be a single parent." Ever since I got the promotion, it's been relentless."

"Did you try talking about it?"

Merrick's mouth twisted miserably. "I'm not good at talking about feelings, Paula. I'm a bloke. I tried to explain about how it is, how what I do matters, but she just twists it round so it sounds like I think the job's more important than her and the kids. It's been brewing a while, but this case has just been the last straw. She accuses me of preferring to spend my time talking to hookers than to her."

Paula put a hand on his arm. "From what you're saying, I

wouldn't blame you if you did. What about relationship counselling? Have you thought about that?"

Merrick tipped his head back and stared up at the ceiling. "Thing is, Paula, I'm not even sure I want to go back. I'm not the same man who married Lindy. I've gone in one direction and she's gone in another. We've nothing in common any more. Did you know she's gone back to college part-time? She wants to be an educational psychologist. Can you believe it? Feels like the only psychology she's learned is how to put me down."

"So you've maybe been staying in the pub a bit longer than you would otherwise?" Paula wasn't quite sure where this was going, nor how she wanted to play it.

"Maybe. But whatever's going on between me and Lindy, I don't want to lose my kids. I love my lads, you know that."

"I know that, Don. But leaving Lindy doesn't mean losing your kids. You can still be their dad even if you don't live with their mum. You can still take them to the footie, go swimming with them, take them on holiday even."

Merrick snorted. "And how easy is that in this job? How often do we knock off when we're supposed to?"

"You're an inspector now. You don't work shifts, you don't have to do the overtime like you used to. You can make a space for your boys in your life. If you want it badly enough, you'll do it."

He gave her a pleading look. "You think so?"

"I think so." Paula glanced over to the bar where a bunch of men in their twenties were arguing loudly about the football. She made an instant decision she hoped she wouldn't come to regret. "This is a dump, Don. Have you got somewhere to stay?"

He looked away. "I thought I'd check into a hotel."

"Don't be daft. If you and Lindy are going to split up, you're going to need all your pennies. You can have my spare room," Paula said gruffly.

"You mean it?" He seemed genuinely surprised.

"If you don't mind sharing it with the world's biggest pile of ironing."

The ghost of a smile spread across Merrick's face. "Didn't you know I'm shit hot with the iron?"

"Perfect. Just don't use my razor, OK?"

Sam Evans cracked open the window of his car to let a trickle of smoke out. One thing about doing stakeouts in red-light districts was that nobody paid much attention to a lone man sitting in a car. Nobody except the working girls, but they'd steered clear after he flashed his warrant card at the first to approach him. He'd stressed he wasn't interested in them, and they'd left him alone.

Aidan Hart's alibi might have been enough for Carol Jordan, but when he had interviewed the psychologist, Sam Evans had sensed a man with something to hide. He wondered what that something was and whether it might be turned to his advantage. If there was a way to put Aidan Hart in the frame for murder, it would be to Evans' advantage in every possible way.

So he'd taken to watching Hart whenever he got the chance. One thing soon became clear: Hart and his wife led virtually separate lives. He didn't know if that was from mutual preference, or if it had evolved because Hart only seemed to go home to sleep. His evenings were usually spent in bars and restaurants, drinking and dining with men who looked like him prosperous, well-groomed and self-satisfied.

But there was another side to Aidan Hart's life that Evans wouldn't mind betting was unknown to his drinking buddies. On the nights when he wasn't engaged in career-building and male bonding, he picked up women for sex. The shock he'd had when Evans had confronted him obviously hadn't been enough to still his appetite. All it had done was to relocate it.

Instead of trawling in Temple Fields, Hart had gone further afield. Manningham Lane in Bradford, Whalley Range in Manchester and now Chapeltown in Leeds. From what Sam could glean, he went for women who had a place to go rather than settling for a blow job in his gleaming black 4x4. On two occasions, he'd gone back for seconds after adjourning to an Indian restaurant for a meal.

Hart's apparent addiction to hookers didn't trouble Evans on a moral level. He'd shagged a few of them himself over the years. But it did make him wonder about what was going on inside Hart's head. Certainly, it was providing Evans with ammunition that he might be able to make something of. Everybody knew that sexual murderers often used prostitutes, everybody knew that exposure to extreme behaviour desensitized people. Hart was starting to shape up nicely as a suspect, even if Carol Jordan had taken him out of the picture.

Evans was determined that his assignment to the Major Incident Team would be the next step on his upward climb. And if he had to make Carol Jordan look derelict in her duty to achieve it, well, so be it.

He was the one with the knowledge, after all. And knowledge was power.

The knock on his office door was the usual perfunctory rap of the hospital staff. "Come in," Tony called.

One of the nurses stuck his head round the door. "You wanted to see a patient in here, that right? Not in an interview room?"

"That's right."

The nurse raised his eyebrows in a sceptical expression as if to absolve himself of any responsibility for what might happen. "I'll go and get him, then."

While he waited, Tony wondered about the strategy he was about to pursue. Thinking outside the box was his speciality,

but he didn't normally impose his wilder ideas on vulnerable people. He barely had to rehearse the arguments against it, so strong were they: it was unprofessional, it potentially put a patient in danger and it was against all the principles of treatment to ask something of a patient that had no direct relevance to his therapeutic regime. On the other side of the balance, he had constructed his own argument. The possibility of saving lives should override all other considerations. The patient wouldn't be in physical danger because this was a controlled environment. The best thing he could do for this particular patient was to raise his self-esteem, and setting him an achievable task was a good way of doing that. Of course, it was arguable whether this was an achievable task, so Tony would have to take care to make it apparent he thought it was close to impossible, that it was a last throw of the dice.

Which it was, of course.

There was no time for further speculation. The nurse pushed the door open and moved back to allow Tom Storey to enter. He took a couple of uncertain steps across the threshold, then paused. His stoop had become more pronounced, Tony noted. Storey looked around, an expression of faint puzzlement on his placid features. His grey eyes swept round shelves already crammed to bursting with books, box files and padded envelopes with torn corners. They came to rest on Tony, who had swivelled round on his chair so he had his back to the paper-strewn desk and faced out into the room. "Come in, Tom," Tony said, getting to his feet. "Take a seat." He gestured towards one of a pair of low chairs arranged in a corner.

Storey frowned. "We don't normally meet in here," he said uncertainly.

"No, we don't," Tony said.

"Does that mean you've got bad news for me?"

Tony wondered fleetingly whether an operable brain tumour was good or bad news for a man in Tom Storey's position. "I

have got some news for you, it's true. But also we're here because today, I need your help. Come on, sit down." He took the older man's elbow and steered him to one of the chairs then sat opposite.

"How are you doing, Tom?" he asked.

Storey averted his eyes and stared down at the place where his hand used to be. The club of bandages had given way to a lighter dressing, making it look as if he had a particularly uninteresting sock-puppet on the end of his arm. "You were right. They say I've got a tumour in my brain." He rotated his head, as if trying to relieve a stiff neck. "Funny, not so long ago that would have seemed like the worst thing in the world."

"It's never a good thing. How would you feel if I told you that the tumour is operable?"

A faint sheen of sweat appeared on Storey's bald head. He gazed mournfully at Tony. "This is a terrible thing to say, but I'd want them to operate. I'd want to live. I know that a lot of the time I feel like I've got nothing left to live for, but if you ask me whether I'd rather take a chance on living, I'd say yes."

Tony couldn't help the swelling of pity for Tom Storey's ruined life. So unnecessary, so final. So much the worse because Storey was clearly an intelligent man who now had devastating insight into his condition. "You feel guilty about that, don't you, Tom? On top of all the other stuff you have to feel guilty about, you feel guilty because you want to live."

Eyes sparkling with tears, Storey nodded. "I'm a coward," he stammered. "I ... I can't face myself for what I sent them to."

"You're not a coward, Tom. Dying, that would be the coward's way out. Living with yourself is what takes courage. You can't give back what you took away, but you can live what remains of your life with good intention."

"So is it operable, then? This tumour, can they get rid of it?"

Tony nodded. "So they tell me. Like I said before, it won't cure what's wrong inside your mind, but we can help make that easier for you. You'll have noticed a difference already with the meds we've put you on?"

Storey nodded. "I feel a lot calmer. A lot more in control."

That was, Tony thought, good news for his plan. "And that should continue to improve," he said. "What the operation will do is to give you a future. And I think you can make use of a future, Tom. I really do."

Storey rubbed his eyes with the back of his remaining hand. "They won't ever let me out of here, will they?"

"It's not impossible, Tom. A lot depends on you, and a lot depends on us."

"So I suppose you want to write about me? Make yourself a name by treating me? Is that how you want me to help you?" There was a faint but unmistakable note of resentment in his voice.

Genuinely taken aback, Tony cursed himself for assuming he'd won a more secure place in Tom Storey's confidence than he clearly had. "I'm sorry you think we're here to exploit your pain, Tom," he said, trying to recover ground he hadn't even known he'd lost.

"It's how you people get on, isn't it? You put the likes of me under the microscope, then you turn us into articles and books."

Tony shook his head. "That's not how I operate, Tom. Yes, I do write up cases sometimes, but not out of ambition." He spread his hands, encompassing the room. "Does this look like the habitat of an ambitious man to you?"

Storey looked around him again, this time making his assessment more obvious. There were no degrees or diplomas on the walls, no books with his name on the cover prominently displayed, nothing that indicated Tony wanted to impress anyone with his position or achievements. "I suppose not," he said. "So why do you do it if it's not to make yourself look good?"

"I do it because what I've learned from someone like you could mean my colleagues giving better treatment to the people who come to them for help. That's certainly the only reason I can be bothered reading what other doctors have to say. If I was ever going to write about you and at this point, that's not on my list of things to do because I don't know what the outcome's going to be for you I'd be writing to try and raise the awareness of your condition so that the next Tom Storey gets the support he needs sooner than you did." Tony spoke with passion and sincerity, and Storey visibly relaxed as the words sank in.

"When you say you want my help, what are you getting at?"

"I've been watching the way you interact with the other people who live here. You're very good with them. You seem to have the knack of connecting with people who don't always respond very well with the staff."

Storey shrugged. "I was always good with people before .. ."

"Before you got ill?"

"Before I went mad, you mean. Why don't you just say it? Nobody ever says the word in here. Nobody calls us nutters, or loonies or even patients. You all pussyfoot around, as if we don't know why we're here."

Tony smiled, trying to defuse Storey's irritation. "Would you prefer it if we did?"

"It would be more honest. You expect us to be honest all the time in therapy, but you dress our world up in euphemism."

Tony sized up the moment. If he was going to rewrite the rule book, this was his opening. "OK, I'll try to be more direct. You're good with the nutters. They trust you. They like you. They see you as one of them, so they don't feel threatened by you."

"That's because I am one of them," Storey said.

"But most of the time you're still the person you were before your body betrayed you. And I'm gambling that that's how you can help me." Tony took a deep breath and leaned back in his chair. "I have another job. When I'm not here, I help the police. I analyse the behaviour of offenders and try to give them pointers that can help them catch criminals before they commit more crimes."

"You're a profiler, you mean? Like Cracker?"

Tony winced. "Not much like Cracker. And even less like Jodie Foster. There's nothing very glamorous about what I do. But yes, I am a profiler. Right now, I'm working with Bradfield police. There's a killer they need to catch before he takes any more lives."

Storey looked confused. "What's that got to do with me?"

"A patient in here was convicted two years ago of killing four women. There was no doubt about his guilt. The forensic evidence was compelling, and he admitted what he'd done. But now another woman has died in exactly the same way. Whoever is doing it knows everything about the original crimes, including details that were never made public'

"And you think the man in here is innocent? And you want me to help you prove it?" Storey sounded eager, his face animated.

"I don't know if he's innocent, Tom. All I know is that he has information locked away in his head that might help us stop any more women dying. And he won't talk to me. He won't talk to anyone. He's scarcely said a word since he arrived here. What I want you to do is to persuade him to talk to me."

Storey looked uncertain again. "Me? You think he'll talk to me?"

"I don't know that either. But I've tried everything else I know to get him to open up, and I've failed. So I'm willing to try anything, however crazy it might seem."

"Crazy's the word." Storey gave a little snort of amusement. "The lunatics have taken over the asylum."

Tony shrugged. "Only part of it. So, what do you think? Will you give it a try?"

Carol ran her wrists under the cold tap, trying literally to cool down after her case-review meeting with Brandon. She'd always found Brandon a reasonable boss, someone who hadn't forgotten what the job was like at the sharp end. But today she'd felt demoralized and uninspired, and she knew he'd been disappointed in her performance. She couldn't blame him: she was disappointed herself.

At least she'd managed to persuade Brandon not to pull her budget from under her feet and reduce the level of the Sandie Foster inquiry to her own small team. She could still call on other officers as and when she had something for them to do. But it was galling to feel his frustration mirroring her own and to be unable to suggest a course of action that would remedy it. She knew one of the reasons for her success as a detective was her ability to think laterally, to come up with the tangent that nobody else had considered. But on these two cases, she felt trapped in deep ruts of conventional thinking, unable to see over the rims.

And part of that reason was that another of her gifts had turned into a curse. Carol had perfect recall of speech. It made her masterly in the interview room, enabling her to trap her victims in the toils of their own words. But these days, the tape that kept looping through her brain more often than not had nothing to do with what she was working on. She was working so hard not to hear the fragments of dialogue that crept under her guard that she had no space in her mind for those promptings of her subconscious that might just take her further forward.

Carol leaned her forehead against the cool mirror and closed her eyes. What she wouldn't give for a glass of wine right now.

The door to the ladies' toilets banged open and Paula rushed in. Carol jerked erect, taking in the startled reflection of her junior in the mirror. "Hi, Paula," she said wearily. Paula had been even more distant than usual at that morning's briefing. Carol tried not to take it personally, working on convincing herself that Paula had been scratchy with everyone. But she hadn't managed it.

"Chief," Paula said, hesitating on her way to the cubicle. "How did the review go?"

Carol pulled herself together, assuming the appearance of calm authority she knew she needed with a detective she feared was already on the road to writing her off. "As you'd expect. Nobody's very happy with such conspicuous lack of progress in two very expensive inquiries. But at least they're not scaling us back just yet." Carol made to pass Paula and head for the door. But Paula wasn't finished with her.

"I've been looking at the Tim Golding file again," she said, her body language already on the defensive.

"Something strike you?" Carol tried to keep her voice as neutral as possible.

"That photo, chief. I don't know much about rocks and stuff, but the background looks pretty distinctive to me. I was wondering if there was any mileage in blacking out the image of the boy and asking climbing and rambling magazines to print it, see if anybody recognizes where it was taken?"

Carol nodded. Once that would have occurred to her. Now her thought processes were blurred with too many bad memories. And too much wine, a small voice in the back of her head muttered. "Good idea, Paula. Ask Stacey to work something up and we'll get the press office to send it out asap." Carol had taken a couple of steps towards the door when something in Paula's words triggered a faint memory. She half-turned just as Paula pushed open the cubicle door. "Paula? What do you know about forensic geology?"

Paula looked puzzled. "Forensic geology? Never heard of it, chief."

"I heard something on the radio a few months ago. I wasn't really paying attention, but they were definitely talking about forensic geology. I wond&r if someone like that might be able to help us narrow the location down?" Carol was thinking out loud rather than talking to Paula, but she was suddenly taken aback to see the DCs face light up in appreciation. It was as if this was the moment she'd been anticipating for weeks. It should have pleased Carol that she seemed finally to be dispelling the doubt she'd felt emanating from Paula. Instead, it saddened her to think that she'd been so far removed from her former self.

"That's a brilliant idea, chief," Paula said, giving the thumbs-up sign.

"Maybe," Carol said. "For all I know, these guys just do the Sherlock Holmes thing of looking at the mud on your trousers and revealing which field you got splashed in. But it's worth a try."

She walked back to the squad room telling the small condemnatory voice inside her that the white wine hadn't completely done for her brain cells. "Sam," she called as she crossed the floor. "Get on to the BBC website and see what you can find under forensic geology."

Sam looked up from his desk, startled by the unfamiliar vigour in Carol's voice. "Sorry?"

"BBC website, forensic geology. Print out what you can find then get me somebody local to talk to," Carol said over her shoulder. "There's probably someone at the university earth sciences department who can point you in the right direction." She closed her door behind her, shutting out the main room behind the recently installed blinds. She dropped into her chair and put her head in her hands, feeling a slither of sweat under her fingers. Christ, but it had been a long time coming, this small and blessed inspiration. It wasn't enough to solve anything. But at least it was a start. And she had some breathing space to explore it.

He looks at the tools of what has become his trade laid out before him. The handcuffs, the ankle restraints. The leather gag. The pliable rubber dildo. The razor blades. The latex gloves. The cameras. The laptop. The mobile. All he has to do now is slip the blades into the dildo then swaddle it in kitchen roll so it doesn't take his fingers off.

He presses replay on his mini disk player and the Voice floods over him, taking him through it one more time. He doesn't need this reminder of what has to be done; he knows it by heart. But he likes to listen. Nobody ever made him feel this good, and what he does in return seems like a very small price to pay for something so right.

The Voice tells him who to pick, makes it easy for him. There's nothing left to chance. Tonight he'll find her round the corner from the shitty hotel just off Bellwether Street where they rent rooms by the hour to women like her. She'll be leaning against the big cast-iron litter bin, like as not. She'll be amused when he tells her what he wants from her, like as not. The women don't expect anything from him except always having good gear. He's just there. Part of the landscape. Not worth paying attention to.

But she'll pay attention tonight. It'll be the last bit of attention she pays to anybody. But it will be paid to him, and that means something.

The streetlights hung like luminous boiled sweets in the thin fog of the early evening. Bradfield's rush hour had spread like a middle-aged stomach even in the few years Tony had been away. But that evening, he was oblivious to his surroundings, working his way across town from Bradfield Moor to his new home on automatic pilot. Music spilled out of the tape player; he'd no idea what it was. Something soothing, minimalist and repetitive. One of his students back at St. Andrews had given him the tape. He couldn't remember why now something about brain wave function. He liked it because it covered up the background interference, shutting out road noise, other people's engines, the low subdued roar of the city's life.

He wondered about the task he'd set Tom Storey. Was he asking too much of a profoundly damaged man? Would Storey feel so pressurized that he'd blow up again? Tony didn't think so, but he couldn't know for sure. He'd gone way outside the limits this time, and he knew how bad he'd feel if it had any adverse effect on Storey.

It dawned on him that feeling bad might be the least of his worries. Aidan Hart would go ballistic if he found out what Tony had done. It flew in the face of every therapeutic regime in the book, but in Tony's view, the book had been written by people with at least as many problems as those they professed to treat. He knew this because he was one of them. His own difficulties with personal relationships of any kind, the impotence that had dogged him for most of his adult life, his failure to turn his feelings for Carol into any functional shape; these were all measures of his closeness to the ruined personalities he tended in his clinical role.

At least he knew he could do that with some semblance of competence. His empathy with their dysfunctionality made it possible for him to tease out useful treatment programmes. If it sometimes left him feeling uncomfortably comp licit that was a bearable trade-off.

What he couldn't reconcile himself to was the guilt he felt towards Carol. Right now, the best way to help her heal seemed to be helping her to do her job. And the key to that was Derek Tyler. Which went some way to providing him with self-justification for the process he'd set in motion.

"Oh, Derek, Derek, Derek. You crave the silence because that way you can still hear the voice," he said out loud, continuing a conversation he'd been having with himself since he'd left the hospital. "The voice does what?" He paused, thinking and feeling, before he answered himself. "It reassures you. It tells you that what you did was good. If you couldn't hear the voice, you might have to consider that what you did was bad. So you need to hear the voice. So you don't talk, because that way nobody talks to you. So who's the voice?"

He turned off the main drag into a side street. It was only when he couldn't find a parking space that he realized he had come home to the wrong house. He was in the street where he'd lived the last time he'd worked in Bradfield. His automatic pilot had taken him to quite the wrong part of town.

Jackie Mayall walked into the hotel lobby. It wasn't much of a reception area; it wasn't much more than a large room with an alcove cut off by a chest-high counter. It had the kind of carpet visitors knew their feet would stick to. She leaned behind the counter, stretching to reach for a key. "It's Jackie," she shouted over the muffled hectic sound of Sky Sport coming from a room to the left of the grimy formica counter. "I've taken twenty-four."

"Right. That's ten past six," a voice called back. "I'm writing it down, so don't you take the piss."

"As if," she muttered, heading for the threadbare narrow stairs that led up to the room on the second floor that she knew too miserably well. She let herself in and tried not to notice her surroundings. It was about as unappetizing a place for sex as it was possible to imagine. It could have served as a dictionary definition of scruffy, grimy or down-at-heel. A worn blue candlewick spread covered the sagging bed. The dressing table's cheap veneer was chipped and peeling. One upright chair sat by a dirty sink.

Jackie looked at herself in the mottled mirror. About time she dyed her hair again. She didn't care about the half-inch of black showing at the roots, but she understood the virtue of window dressing. Her skimpy skirt, halter-neck top, knee-length boots were all smarter than most of the girls on the street. She reckoned that was why she could afford to charge enough to bring most of her punters here, instead of shagging in shop doorways and bobbing over blow jobs in the backs of cars. Impatiently, she turned away, tossing her bag on the bed. She sat down on the edge of the bed, wondering if she should take off her boots or whether he'd want to see that for himself. He was paying her good money, after all. He deserved the best she could do for him.

A tentative knock at the door brought her to her feet again. She yanked the door hard, to overcome the way it always stuck. She eyed him up and down, sardonic amusement in her eyes. "Come on then, the meter's running," she said, turning her back on him and heading straight for the bed. "I've got no time for men who take all night."

As soon as Tony walked through the door, he dialled Carol's number. "Who's the voice, Derek?" he said, absently listening to the ring tone.

"Carol Jordan," she said abruptly.

"Who's the voice, Carol," he demanded without preamble. "It doesn't make sense. None of the usual voices make sense."

"Nice to talk to you too, Tony," she said, weary humour in her tone.

"The thing about voices, they're a bit like past-life regression."

"I'm sorry?"

"When people do those past-life regressions, they've never been a stable boy or a mill hand. They've always been Cleopatra or Henry the Eighth or Emma Hamilton. It's the same with people who hear voices. They don't hear the milkman or the woman who sits behind them on the bus every morning. They hear the Virgin Mary or John Lennon or Jack the Ripper."

"Well, it's hard to imagine your average milkman giving out detailed instructions about carrying out sexual homicide," Carol said drily.

Tony paused for a moment. He grinned. "So you think it's more likely the Virgin Mary that would be behind that?" Carol giggled. Tony felt a quick flash of pride. He'd done something very human. He'd made her laugh. He'd almost forgotten how much he liked the sound of her laughter, it had been so long since he'd heard it. "But anyway," he continued, covering up his momentary lapse from the professional, 'what I'm trying to get at is that these are grandiose voices. They live inside the head of the person hearing them and they are dynamic. What they say changes according to circumstance. You don't have to worry about silence. You don't need silence because the voice doesn't mind noise. It just makes itself heard when it wants to be, whenever it's convenient. Well, convenient for the person hearing the voice, not usually convenient for the rest of us," he added hastily.

"And you're saying Derek Tyler's voice isn't like that?"

"That's exactly what I'm saying. It's as if he's scared of losing it. Scared that it might get swallowed up in the background noise. I've never come across anything quite like it, not in life, not in the literature. It's as if .. ." He shook his head. "I need to go and do some more research. There must be something in the literature .. . Unless we're breaking completely new ground." His voice tailed off.

"Tony?"

"I'll call you. I need to think about this. Thanks for listening to me." Whatever she said in reply was lost as he hung up the phone. He'd never encountered anything like Derek Tyler's voice. If it broke all the rules, maybe it was time for him to do the same thing. Instead of working with probabilities, maybe he should start considering improbabilities. He headed upstairs to his study, muttering, "Six impossible things before breakfast."

DS Kevin Matthews stood behind the Woolpack Hotel reception desk, notebook in hand. There wasn't much room behind the counter, which meant he was uncomfortably close to the seedy individual who had introduced himself as Jimmy de Souza, night manager. In spite of the stench of sweat, cigarettes and stale pizza that ballooned around de Souza, Kevin preferred this view to what was upstairs in room 24. One quick look had been enough to tell him that interviewing the man who had found the body was definitely not the short straw. Much better to be down here where there was nothing more disturbing to see than a cheesy night manager and a stream of SO COs and cops going in and out.

De Souza was stocky, with a round belly that strained his grubby white T-shirt and the waistband of his shell-suit trousers. His black hair was greased back from a sharp widow's peak, and a rosebud mouth over a plump, rounded chin gave him a look of petulance. "Look, I told you," he said, a faint trace of distant parts underpinning his Bradfield accent, "I only come out if somebody rings the bell. People like their privacy. That's what they're paying for."

"By the hour," Kevin said, his voice acidic.

"So? It's not against the law, is it, renting rooms by the hour? People have needs." De Souza started to pick his nose then thought better of it as he noticed Kevin's lip curl in distaste.

"So you rented out room twenty-four when exactly?"

De Souza pointed to a thick desk diary lying open on the ledge beneath the counter. "There. Ten past six."

Kevin glanced at it. The time and a name scrawled next to it in a clumsy hand. "And who did you rent it out to? I'm assuming correct me if I'm wrong it wasn't Margaret Thatcher."

"Slag calls herself Jackie. Skinny bit of stuff with bleach-blonde hair. She used to come in most nights a few times."

"You don't know her surname?"

De Souza leered. "You kidding? Who's interested?"

"Who was she with?"

"I dunno. I was in the back, watching the football. She shouted through that she was taking the key and I just wrote down the time. She'd settle up on her way out. I like to give the regulars a bit of leeway."

"So you didn't see who was with her?" Kevin asked again.

"I don't even know if he was with her. Often the blokes hang back a few minutes, so nobody sees them. The girls just tell them what room to come to."