Game Over

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The habits learned in childhood tend to become ingrained, so that they operate on an involuntary level. With Detective Inspector Bill Slider, observation was second nature. His countryman father had taken him out to watch badgers’ setts at dusk, to wait for deer to come down to the stream at dawn, to know by a flattened patch of grass, a scrap of hair snagged on a hedge, a broken spider’s web, fallen feathers, or the crusty bits of a mouse left by a path-side, who had passed by, and when, and why. He noticed things often without immediately knowing he had done so.

So on his way to a call-out it was the second sighting of the black Ford Focus that impinged on him. Focuses were plentiful in West London and black had lately replaced silver as the most popular car colour, so there was nothing remarkable about it, except that it had tinted windows, and he was inherently suspicious of anyone trying to hide their face, and that there had been a black Focus parked just down the road from the back door of the police station the day before. It had had the same ding-and-scrape on the nearside rear quarter, but a different number plate. Slider’s interest prickled. The traffic halted him along the Goldhawk Road, just after the car had passed him, and he whipped out his notebook and jotted down its registration while he remembered it. He didn’t remember the number of the earlier car except that it had begun with LN, while this began with LR. It was probably nothing, of course, but he had noticed it, and the fact of noticing made him uneasy. If he was being followed, it was following of a professional order, to have bothered to change the plates. But anyone who had been in the Job as long as he had was bound to accumulate enemies, and he had had his share of high-profile cases.

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