It had been a surprisingly easy case, the one that had led to the arrest of Donald Clitheroe.

None of the details had been released to the media, only that a girl had been murdered.

The murderer had been apprehended exactly twenty-four hours after the discovery of the body.

Donald Clitheroe's last murder.

He was a man in his mid-twenties, a local man, a distant relative of the murdered girl. He had been sentenced to life imprisonment following a full confession to a series of brutally horrific murders of young women.

Thompson checked with the desk sergeant, who had sent Hargreaves to investigate a complaint from one of the residential areas about a youth throwing stones at a lamppost. Every available officer was searching for Clitheroe. It was getting on for lunchtime. Thompson, still seething from Wilson’s insensitivity, decided to call it a day and left the station.

Six

Shirley was both pleased and surprised when Thompson arrived home.

'Finished early?' she asked, but as soon as she looked into his eyes she knew there was something wrong.

'What is it? What's the matter with you now?'

'I need time to think, I need time to be on my own, away from that lot......'

'Oh.......'

'I can't work there, not with Campbell, he's a moron......'

'Has something happened?'

He nodded, and passed his hand through this short hair.

'Kim Catchpole. Dead. Raped, murdered.....'

Shirley's hands flew to her mouth and she started to shake.

'Not the Kim who......!'

He nodded again.

'Wilson arrived about ten o'clock, forced me to go with him to the soc.'

'Oh, no!'

'He more or less told me to take the case. I can't! I won't!'

Shirley shook her head sympathetically and held his arm, comforting him. He was worse now than he had been immediately after the Sharringford incident.

'What will you do?'

He started to pace the room. She watched him anxiously.

'He can't make me do it!' he muttered. 'I've resigned. Parkinson will sign me off. He can't make me do it!'

'Calm down, calm down! You're getting yourself all worked up for nothing!'

'He can't make me!'

'I'm calling the Doctor!' she said firmly. She did not like the way her husband was behaving at all.

'No!' he shouted, startling her. 'Don't you dare!'

'You need help!'

'I had all the bloody help I needed! Now leave me alone, just leave me alone to think this through!'

'Please.....' she pleaded.

'Leave me alone!' he shouted.

She rushed from the room, weeping, and he heard her go upstairs, into the bedroom, shutting the door behind her. He felt sorry, and mean, and wretched, and miserable, but for the moment he was not in control of himself. He had never shouted at her, not ever. Her or the kids. Shouting was not something he did to his family. Wilson shouted. Wilson had shouted at Clitheroe, shouted a lot.

Later Thompson would apologise, make his peace, everything would be all right. Later. Later.

He paced the room, angry with her for not understanding, angry with himself for having shouted at her. It was clear in his mind what had to be done.

He had resigned from the force.

He was serving out his notice.

He was on light duties.

Campbell could take the case. Besides, it was surely only a matter of picking up Clitheroe. Who else could it have been?

Wilson had no right to involve him.

No right.

No right.

He began to feel weary. The familiar signs of the migraine headache manifested inside his head, behind his eyes. He opened his briefcase, took out the injector, went into the toilet and pulled down his trousers. He held it against his leg, fired the trigger, counted to ten, no to fifteen, to be on the safe side. He removed the injector from his leg, saw the tiny hole and the trickle of blood, wiped it away with a piece of toilet tissue. He pulled up his trousers and went back into the living room and sat, no, lay down on the settee and closed his eyes.

The migraine passed rapidly. The new treatment was good, and fast. Now he could think clearly. He would not let himself be bullied by Wilson. His resignation stood. There was no going back on that. He no longer wanted to work in the force. He could no longer work in the force. He had been prepared to work out his notoice, give it a try. But just look what had happened! Nothing Wilson could say or do would alter his decision to leave.

But neither could he ignore this murder.

It had to have been Clitheroe, but suppose it was not? Suppose someone else had discovered the gruesome secret of Clitheroe's murders, the handful of details only he and Clitheroe’s solicitor had known about?

He could no more walk away from the murder of Kim Catchpole than if it had been one of his own daughters. He would have to get involved. He would have to do the ground work, the leg work, the foundation work, even if he left it unfinished.

There was nobody else. Campbell was useless. Nothing more than a traffic cop.

Ken Hargreaves was okay. A good, solid worker with a good reputation and a sound conscience. Never likely to make higher than Sergeant. Who else was there? It was a big county, spread out across several small villages. The frequency of murders was comparatively small. When they did occur, it was normally domestic. There were always going to be serial killers They cropped up with alarming regularity every decade. And there were always going to be child killers. It was inevitable. For a moment Thompson wondered if this latest killing could be the start of another spate of murders of young girls, but dismissed it immediately. Clitheroe had killed teenaged girls a decade or so ago. He had escaped within the last couple of days, and a girl had been murdered. Pretty well cut and dried, wouldn’t you say? he asked himself. But things were not always what they seemed. Murders did still take place, and weren’t always solved with the rapidity demanded by the public. In North Norfolk the frequency of anything 'serious' was small, really. The senior officers had to spread themselves far and wide.

He had handled Sharringford single-handedly. There had been no choice. They had been stretched to the limit with motorway accidents in dense fog and flooding when the Wensum burst its banks. He had been the nearest senior officer to Sharringford, living just a few miles down the road. So he had been the first on the scene. No one else had apparently been able to find a way into the village until the following morning. For Thompson, Sharringford was a harrowing memory, up there on a par with the Hillsborough Stadium disaster and the Kings Cross underground fire. He had watched people die, powerless to help them because of his broken ankle, and afterwards his mind had simply shut down.

Sharringford.

He opened his eyes. The dancing lights were receding, gone. His head cleared. He knew what he had to do.

He went upstairs, knocked on the bedroom door, and said softly,

'I'm sorry. I don't know what came over me. I'm sorry.'

There was no reply.

Bad sign.

Better if she had told him to 'piss off!'.

But nothing.

Always a bad sign.

It meant that this was going to drag on.

At least for the rest of today, there would be tension between them. The children would notice, they would ask pointed questions, and the ridiculous, impersonal answers they both gave would sound ridiculous, impersonal. 'Your mother and I have had a disagreement'.

It made them both seem slightly.......ridiculous. There was no other word for it. He was prepared to take the blame, no question of that, he had acted out of turn, spoken out of turn, out of order.

'I'm sorry, Shirley,' he said again. 'I'm really sorry. I shouldn't have spoken to you like that.'

Again there was no answer.

The doorbell rang, harshly, insistently.

Cursing the timing of this intrusion, Thompson went slowly downstairs and opened the door. It was Wilson.

'Thompson.'

There was no smile, no greeting, just the curt grunt of his name.

'Come in.'

Wilson pushed past his junior officer and into the living room, in which he had been entertained by Thompson and Shirley on several occasions before. Now he was not there to be entertained.

He sat down heavily, took off his gloves and started to knock them against his other hand. Thompson had seen this before. The man's mood was clear, and clearly it was not good.

'Why did you leave the station?'

'I had a migraine.'

'Balls!'

Thompson showed him the injector. Wilson refused to acknowledge it as evidence.

‘I asked you to take this case on. If you're going to do it, all well and good, but I get the distinct impression that you're not, you're going to leave it for Campbell to cock up, while you sit back laughing and say 'I told you so!' Well, it's not on, and you know it. It’s your duty to help catch Clitheroe so that we can get him behind bars and prevent the bastard from doing it again! I’ve got a dozen officers out at Sculthorpe, where he disappeared.’'

'You don’t need me, then. In any case, Jock can work the computer as well as I can, Sir.'

'That's not true, and you know it isn't. In any case, what you're talking about won't be on the computer, we didn't have a computer then.'

Thompson shook his head emphatically.

‘I'm not taking the case. You've had my resignation. I require an acknowledgement from you. In the meantime, I’m back on sick leave. Besides, you know who did it. He can’t have vanished. He may have relatives or friends in the area. Knock on doors. Watch the coast. That’s all I’d do. But I’m not doing it. I’m not coming back.'

'You know you can't leave. I need you, the force needs you......it's your duty!'

'I can't help that. I am not fit to continue in that duty. I feel that I have no other choice but to resign. I won't be doing much except to clear up some paperwork and so on.'

Wilson stood up, furious. A vein in his temple had begun to throb, and his colour had heightened noticeably.

'We'll see about that! I want you in the office tomorrow for a thorough examination by an independent doctor. You can't do this!' he snarled. 'You know that Campbell's about as good as a two-legged horse! I only brought him in to wake you up!'

Thompson looked up at Wilson. He was unmoved.

'I knew that,' he said softly.

'What do you want me to do, beg you to reconsider? Go down on my knees? Put you up for promotion? What do you want!'

'You don't understand, do you?'

'No, because you won't let me understand! Whatever you went through in Sharringford, you won't talk about it, you won't have counselling, you won't let anyone help you. We don't know what went on in there! You won't tell us!'

'I can't tell you,' Thompson said sadly, 'because I can't remember. More importantly, I don't want to remember. Sharringford has nothing to do with it.'

'So you’re not resigning because of Sharringford?'

'I don't know. Maybe. I just know I can't carry on being a good policeman. Not any more. I watched people die in Sharringford and there wasn’t a thing I could do about it. I’ve had enough, that’s all. I’ve had enough. I want a rest.'

'Whatever it was, we can help you. We can get you through the bad times.....'

Thompson smiled apologetically.

'You can't do that. The bad times were then. This is now. This is worse. Not knowing, not remembering.....you don't know what happened any more than I do, but you were happy for me to be off the force for several weeks.....sick leave. Now I tell you that things are no better, I make an effort and come back to work, and on the first day back you take me out to some God-forsaken spot and show me a poor sixteen-year-old kid who's been raped and murdered, then you expect me to take the case on as though nothing has happened. I'm sorry, I can't do it!'

The confusion was overwhelming, now. Conflicting tensions of fear, anger and depression swept through him like an express train through a disused station. Waves of nausea crashed against the defences of his gut, and his headache returned, sharper, more piercing than before.

Wilson stood helpless, himself confused, unable to dredge up any more words of encouragement and persuasion. Thompson was clearly in need of help, in need of comfort, and love. And right now, he could only bully, threaten, and watch with cold impassioned interest as his best detective folded up in front of him.

'Right,' he said, 'it's settled. Campbell's off the case, you're off the case, there's only one alternative.'

He went to the telephone, took out his pocket notebook and dialled a long number.

Nice of you to ask if you could use my phone, Thompson thought.

He sat holding his head, hardly hearing his superior officer. After a brief conversation, Wilson put down the telephone and sat down next to Thompson.

'All right, as far as you're concerned, it's over. I've got a couple of excellent young officers from the city coming up this afternoon to take over. They can just as easily work here, on this case. Be a good experience for them. You can rest, now. But like I said, I want you to have an examination. There's plenty of paperwork you can finish off. For other people, even. You owe us that much. You can sit behind a desk all day for a few days. Maybe that will bring you to your senses. Now, are you as certain as I am that it was Clitheroe?'

Thompson nodded wearily.

'Couldn’t have been anyone else.'

‘Didn’t he ask for several other cases to be taken into consideration?'

Thompson nodded. Wilson’s memory of how he had handled the Clitheroe case had faded with time, or else he was choosing not to remember what there was to remember. What Thompson remembered.

'There are always people waiting to get them out, whoever they are, whatever they've done. It couldn't have been anyone else.'

'Tell you what, take a few more days off. Think about it. If you still feel the same about it in, say, a week's time, I'll action your resignation. I won't try to bully you any more.'

'It wouldn't make any difference.'

'But you'll at least think about it?'

'You'll action my resignation from the proper date?'

'The date you put on it. You have my word.'

'I'll think about it. It won't make any difference, but I'll think about it.'

Wilson smiled for the first time that day.

'Good man! I'll see myself out. Shirley all right? The kids?'

'They're fine.'

'Shirley out?'

'She's upstairs. Headache.'

'I'm sorry. I'll look in on you in a couple of days.'

'No need.'

'I'd like to.'

Thompson watched as Wilson walked away from the house. He had been able to convince Wilson he was going round the twist because of the Sharringford incident. Now he had to convince himself he was not, so that he could concentrate on the task in hand. There were one or two facts about Clitheroe’s latest murder that were giving him cause for concern. Nothing he could single out and analyse, just nagging doubts. Suppose he was wrong?

What then?

No, it was clear cut. It was Clitheroe, and they would have him soon.