“A DCI, really?” the old man repeated. “Then this ought to be good.”
He settled into his seat, staring at me expectantly, and I looked around the circle at all the matching faces. Every instrument had been set aside, and the musicians were wholly waiting on me, my words, my story. I hadn’t spoken of my working days in a while now, since most of my friends were cops themselves and had either been there with me or heard about it just after the fact. I found myself almost eager to dredge up the past.
“Okay. I’ll tell you about the case that brought us together. It all started with a missing kid, a theft, and a new partner…”
One
Fifteen years ago
I sat at my desk, pretending to do paperwork. The pages lay before me, half-filled out, and I held a pen in my hand so that it seemed I had only just paused in my writing. Instead, I looked about the room. I’d always liked watching the other inspectors and the constables hurry from point to point, papers or keys in hand, on their way to do some important task. I would love to have one of those important tasks for myself, rather than be stuck finishing up the paperwork for a petty theft I’d solved the week before.
“DCI MacBain.” Sergeant Jones appeared beside my desk, and I looked up at her with one eyebrow raised, as if I couldn’t believe I’d been interrupted in the middle of my oh-so-important paperwork. “Chief Inspector Dunnel wants to see you in his office.”
“Did he say why?”
DS Jones shook her head. “Just that he wants you to come now.”
“Thank you, Sergeant. I’ll go see what he wants.”
She nodded and left as I heaved myself out of my chair with a sigh. I really hoped this wasn’t about the slightly... unorthodox approach I’d taken with my last case. I was not in the mood for another lecture.
I made my way across the large room towards Dunnel’s office. Glass partitions separated the floor into sections, and desks, all topped with messy stacks of paper and ancient computers, dotted the spaces in between. The writing on the whiteboards, listing crime statistics and open cases, was smudged on a couple of rows, and someone needed to sort through all the postings on the bulletin board and remove the outdated ones since there wasn’t a speck of open cork to be seen.
I knocked on Dunnel’s door, waiting to enter until I heard his gruff voice call me in. I stepped inside, saluted, and sat in the chair before his desk when he motioned towards it. Chief Inspector Rick Dunnel had grey, close-cropped hair and stubble across his face, though today, it looked as if it needed a trim. He was a slim man, though tall, the stiffness in his spine as he sat in his chair a match to the rigidity he applied to his job. He’d replaced my mother as Chief Inspector in Inverness upon her retirement, and he had yet to live up to her legacy.
“Callum, good. There’s something I’d like to talk to you about.” Dunnel had a low, gravelly voice, but I was pretty sure he purposefully pitched his voice down an octave as if that would give him more gravitas.
I sighed, shifted in my seat. “Sir, if this is about my last case--”
“It’s not,” he cut me off. “Though believe me, we will talk about that. No, it’s time for you to get a new partner.”
My eyes widened. “Sir, I thought we agreed that I would be able to work alone for a while.”
“That was three years ago, Callum. It’s time.”
“I like working alone.” Reilly, my old partner, and I had done well together, but the few, short-lived partners I worked with after him hadn’t been able to keep up with the way my mind jumped from point to seemingly unrelated point, and I quickly grew irritated with how often I had to slow my thought process down to explain things to them. So Dunnel and I agreed that I could be my own partner for a while.
“I’m sorry, I should have been clearer,” Dunnel said, eyes slightly narrowed. “Your new partner is already here. This is not a discussion.”
“Where?” I asked. We were alone in his office, and I hadn’t seen new faces in the station.
“The gym. Follow me. I’ll introduce you.”
Dunnel stood, leaving me with no choice but to step outside with him. He led me across the station, past my desk, to the stairs on the far side of the room. The basement housed the gym, training facilities, and locker rooms, and the whole space smelled musty like old, dry sweat mixed with the sawdust that was constantly leaking out of the training dummies. Dunnel pushed the gym doors open, the hinges squealing for a bit of oil, the light that spilt out white and uneven as the bulbs flickered. There were only a few people inside: a man jogging on a treadmill, another lifting weights, and a pair squaring off on the sparring mats.
Dunnel and I approached the fighters and waited for them to finish. We didn’t have to wait long. The woman blocked her partner’s punch, stepped inside his guard, foot hooked around his heel, and with one twist of his arm and her hips, bore him to the ground where he landed with an audible thump, pinning his wrist to the ground, her other hand on his throat, and her knee on his chest.
“Fletcher,” Dunnel called, and the woman looked up from her partner, a grin on her lips. Strands of black hair had escaped from the bun piled atop her head to frame her face, her eyes bright and blue against her flushed face. The bun showed off the undercut at the back of her scalp, just barely edging up over her ears, one of which glittered with several silver studs and hoops. She helped her wheezing partner stand and then stepped off the
