rubbing against his thigh. She was dressed in skintight jeans, a cream-coloured wool jumper and a brown suede jacket. Delaney smiled at her and raised his glass. 'Stella Trant.'
'In the flesh.' Stella leaned against the bar putting her shoulders back in a feline manner, stretching the jumper across her braless chest.
Delaney smiled again and looked again into her deep, green eyes, seeing the playfulness sparking in them now. 'Buy you a drink?'
Stella smiled, nodding, and rubbed her arm, wincing a little.
'You hurt yourself?'
'Tennis elbow. Professional injury.'
'You play tennis?'
'Swinging a whip. Toy one, made of suede. Some guy had me manacle him to a wall in his cellar and pretend to whip him heavily for an hour.' She rubbed her arm again. 'The novelty soon wears off.' She looked at him pointedly and smiled. 'Reminds me a lot of you by the way. Same hair, same dress sense.'
Delaney shook his head, a smile on the edge of his lips. 'Not me. I don't play at things.'
'Is that a fact?'
Delaney looked at her steadily as he finished his second whiskey. 'Not unless I win.'
'Maybe next time I'll let you.'
Superintendent George Napier did little to hide his dislike of the man standing in front of his desk. The man's eyes were bloodshot, his hair was too long, too curly, too far from neatly combed. Altogether there was a sense of looseness to his appearance. Jack Delaney. Slack Delaney more like! Too cocky, too casual, too damned indifferent. George Napier was not a man who did casual and had little time for those that did. He didn't much care for the Irish either. He didn't trust them. He still remembered hundreds of Irish men and women lining the streets of Kilburn to mark the funeral of one of their IRA heroes. Once a criminal always a criminal in his book, and he recognised the status of the IRA as a legitimate political operation about as much as he recognised the legitimacy of the claim Argentina had on the Falklands. Mainly he didn't like the man's sullen, mute insolence. No respect for authority. That was obvious. Like many of his generation he would have benefited from National Service.
George Napier was too young himself to have gone through National Service, but he had joined the Territorial Army while at university and when he graduated it had been a toss-up between the armed forces and the police. The police had won by a narrow margin. The man in front of him wouldn't last a weekend with the TA he decided, let alone the proper army.
As far as he was concerned the police force should be like a domestic army. Anybody who didn't realise they were fighting a war nowadays hadn't read the papers or listened to the news. Never mind the war on terror; the amount of guns and knives on the streets made the boroughs of London every bit as dangerous a place to live as Beirut in his opinion. And to fight that, to bring law and order back to the country, took vision, it took backbone and it took discipline, by God. And although he knew that the man standing in front of him had been responsible for bringing down a couple of bad apples within the department, he was far from convinced that Delaney wasn't a bruised fruit himself. He put the report he had been reading into a folder and shook his head.
'I'm sorry, but that won't be possible. It wouldn't be appropriate, I'm afraid, Inspector.'
'I was responsible for the man's arrest, and he has vital information on another case, sir.'
The superintendent picked up the folder again and waved it at Delaney. 'As I recall it, after his arrest he had to spend time in accident and emergency with a suspected fractured skull. And the other case is the incident in which your wife died?'
'That's right.'
