“Thank you for your care and concern, Mrs Dillon,” Jack said, brushing his friend’s hands away from his collar. “You’ll make someone a fine wife one of these days.”
“Is that an offer?”
“No. Now, if you’re quite through picking on me, can I suggest that we make our way to the scene?” Tyler suggested, feeling a little like a henpecked husband.
Dillon obediently followed Tyler out of the house. “My, my,” he goaded, “we did get out of the wrong side of the bed – again!”
Tyler glanced over his shoulder. “Bollocks,” he growled.
Dillon smiled sweetly. “Next time you can make your own way in.”
Jack paused in mid-stride. “Please, Dill, I’m feeling very delicate today so can we skip the usual pleasantries?”
“Bloody hell, Jack! Why are you always such an arse in the morning?”
”Because I hate getting up early, that’s why.”
“But the morning’s the –”
“– best time of the day,” Jack cut in, speaking over his friend. “How could I forget with you ramming it down my throat every five minutes?”
The bickering continued as they crossed the street to a battered dark green Vauxhall Omega, which had definitely seen better days. DS Steve Bull, another member of his team, was sitting behind the wheel, waiting to go. Jack raised a hand in greeting. “Morning Stevie.”
“Morning guv. Rough night, was it?”
Did he really look that bad? Jack wondered, or had Dillon primed him to say that before getting out of the car?
“For fucks sake, don’t you start, or I’ll send you straight back to division.”
Bull grinned. “Yes, boss.”
“Right Steve,” Jack said as he got in the car, “DCS Holland’s already on his way, which can’t be a good sign. I’d rather not keep him waiting, so let’s blue light it,” he instructed.
“You’re the boss.”
“It’s a pity he doesn’t realise that,” Jack said, nodding at Dillon, who, having removed his jacket, was only now getting into the car.
“Oh, give it a rest. You don’t want me to crease my jacket, do you?” Dillon replied belligerently.
“I don’t know why you spend so much money on suits. With all those bulging muscles you look like a couple of sacks of potatoes wrapped in a tight-fitting cloth,” Jack said, enjoying the look of hurt that appeared on his friends face.
“Yeah, well, at least it’s quality cloth, unlike that cheap rubbish you wear,” Dillon pointed out haughtily.
“Some of us are born with style, others have to buy it,” Jack countered.
Not long after meeting them, Steve had made the mistake of remarking that they argued worse than an old married couple. The observation hadn’t been well received by either of them, even though there was an awful lot of truth in it. After being told to mind his own business, Steve quickly learned to tune them out when they were having a go at each other. Now, he hardly even noticed the squabbling.
“Let’s go then, Steve, before Sean Connery, here, starts making any more personal comments about me,” Dillon said as he pulled his seatbelt on.
Grinning, Bull flipped on the switches that activated the concealed blue lights: one set fitted behind the front grill, the other mounted in the rear window of the unmarked police car. He dropped the automatic gearshift of the powerful car into sports mode and gunned the accelerator.
Steve Bull was a thin, athletic, man with greying hair. At forty-one years of age, he had been a policeman for more than two decades and had been ‘around the block’ a few times before joining the murder squad. He had been on the murder squad for six months now, and since joining Tyler’s team they had taken on five murder investigations. A couple had been straightforward, but the rest had been challenging. It had been an interesting learning curve, to say the least.
Before transferring to AMIP, Bull had been a DS on a CIPP team in the main CID office at Stoke Newington, one of the busiest stations in the Met. The acronym, CIPP, stood for Crime Investigation Priority Project, but it was really just a fancy way of saying a small team of experienced detectives dealing with major crime on the borough. There were normally four, each being run by a DS and staffed by DCs.
The constant caseload of near-fatal shootings, abductions, stabbings, rapes and drug-related crime had left him feeling jaded and disillusioned with the job, or more accurately, with the people that stopped him from doing it properly.
He had spent too long working under the supervision of senior police officials who were so far removed from the real world that they couldn’t differentiate between petty criminals and hardcore offenders who raped, murdered and pillaged without hesitation or remorse.
The job had become too political for his liking. He was sick of the never-ending power struggles within the Service, and continually frustrated by the interference of politicians and civil rights activists – the so-called ‘do-gooders’ brigade, who meant well but knew very little.
They seemed unable to understand one simple overriding fact: that the debased people he and his colleagues dealt with were extremely dangerous individuals who showed no remorse or guilt; they had no feelings of compassion towards those that had suffered, or their loved ones.
Working on the murder squad, with quality people like Tyler and Dillon, had been like a much-needed breath of fresh air to Bull, rekindling an excitement for the job he hadn’t experienced in years.
He glanced at Tyler in the rear-view mirror. He looked younger than his thirty-one years. At six-foot-four, Tyler was a big man. He had a sharp mind and a quick wit. He had been married once, Bull knew, but his wife had been intolerant of his work, and unwilling to accept the risks that he sometimes took. Predictably, it hadn’t worked out.
Steve Bull approved of the way that Tyler handled people. He was patient and fair but he refused to accept slackness from
