Chill Factor

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Scott Walker had just reached the poetic bit — Loneliness…is the cloak you wear — when a movement in the wing mirror caught my attention.

“They’re here,” I said. Emptiness…follows everywhere. I reached out and cut him off before he could break my heart.

“Aw, I like the next bit,” Detective Constable Annette Brown complained without conviction, twisting round in the driver’s seat to see through the back window.

“I’ll sing it to you later.” I clicked the transmit button on my RT three times and spoke into it: “Charlie to Young Turks. Wake up, we’re in business.”

“Promises, promises,” Annette mumbled quietly.

“And you can put it back on Radio Four,” I told her. We were sitting in my car in the short-stay car-park outside Heckley station — that’s railway, not police — with Annette in the driving seat. It’s fifty pence for twenty minutes, except that the barrier was fixed in the upright position with all the covers off the electrical boxes so that it looked as if it were faulty. There were five other unmarked police cars nearby, including a couple of hastily arranged armed response vehicles, awaiting the connection from Manchester that had just arrived. It would have looked bad if we’d all had to stop, one by one, and put a fifty pence piece in the box before we could follow our suspect, so I’d arranged for the barrier to be out of order for an hour. That’s the sort of power I have. Impressive, eh?

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