We got the formal ‘Go’ from the Super the following afternoon, presumably after he had cleared up the pecking order with Sedgewick and the Cheshire brass. Sammy was absolutely in full focus.

“Di, I want you to take Candice for the bags. She does fluffy better than you—shut it, Blondie. You know full well you can. Take a works car, and make sure the stuff gets locked away properly. Some of the court boxes, the ones with padlocks, they’ll do. And Blake?”

“Yes?”

“Sorry, but this is going to be a long job. Disclosure schedule is going to be a sod, but the ‘marked as’ one is going to take even longer. Sort a couple of rooms out, ladies. If you can’t get the lot done on the first day, you can do the rest after a night’s sleep. If you do manage to clear it on day one, I do not want you driving back that evening”

Candice started to object, but Sammy cut her short.

“Don’t care what your big boy might have planned, but you haven’t seen some of the stuff Alun and Rhys have already identified. I will not have you driving when your stress bucket’s full to the brim”

“He’s on nights”

“Who? Big boy?”

“Yes”

“Nothing lost, then. Saloon car, not an estate, okay? Nothing gets lost. I’ve looked at the hotels available already, and there’s a Purple Palace not far from his place, which is within budget. Cheshire may be paying, but taking the piss would be rude. LEXIE?”

“Yeah?”

“Could you confirm your informant is able to meet, and get a preferred day and time”

“Wilco. I’ve already run it past Humint”

“What did they say?”

“Reasonably happy, as long as I step back. My previous is with Enfys, not Neil, and I did mention that the whole team was sort of in on that bit. I met Neil, though, off duty, so I am out”

“Thanks, mate. Have you two got…?”

He started to laugh, and we had to wait until he had finished.

“Sorry, but I was about to ask if you had cameras sorted, then I remembered Neil’s job. Get some data cards from SOCO. As long as we have the chain of evidence tight, we can snap stuff wherever suits, but he might have something else you can’t uplift, so Boy Scout motto applies”

Three days later and Candice and I were finally on the road. It was a profoundly boring drive, across the Severn to the M5 and then the M6, and I was reminded of that long drive over to Gatwick with Charlie, or the others for those church events. At least those had held a promise of some sort of reward, whereas this trip felt more like that one with Jon to interview Harry Bowles.

“You all right, Di?”

“Sorry?”

“You just shuddered”

“Ah. Sorry, Bad memory”

“We both have more than a few of those. You haven’t said what was in the bundles. I’ll be seeing them in a while, so a heads-up might be a good idea”

“Ah. Don’t really want… You’re driving.”

“TLDR?”

“Er… Remember Chrissy? Her arsehole of an uncle?”

“What, that shit about 42 per cent?”

“Sort of. Where that was urging an action—”

“Fucking suicide, Di. Let’s be honest”

“Yes, exactly. This was sort of… post facto rather than prior, if you get me”

“Not gloating and shit?”

“Gloating. And shit. Alun picked up that pile of nightmares, for his sins”

“Ah. Good job I had Jonny Boy out with me, then”

“Yeah. It was him I was thinking of, that shudder. Done a few long drives, but they’ve been for a good thing. Charlie’s hospital stay, Debbie’s wedding, that sort of thing. The time with Jon was when we went to interview Arthur Henry Bowles”

“Serial killer? Cooper victim?”

“The very one. I suspect Sammy had that in mind when he insisted we get a hotel. That time, I made Jon stop over. We’d probably have crashed if he’d tried to drive straight back”

“Understood… Now, I am going to go straight to the Purple Palace and get us checked in, if you don’t mind”

“Can’t get into our rooms till two o’clock”

“Yeah, but we can confirm them, and stop the bastards selling them on. I think we are going to need as much time as possible for this, and I do not want to have to dip out before an evening deadline. Agreed?”

She was absolutely right, so after a round of “Yes, we DO know we can’t get in before two, but we are here, we’ll be late in this evening, and we want our territory marked without having to pee on it”, we were on the last, local leg.

The shop looked rather attractive, a three storey building with several attractive sample prints on display in the ground floor windows, but I was paying more attention to the cameras, at least the ones I could spot. There were a couple of ‘architectural features’ that I suspected were more optically functional than usual, for example, but I had no idea as to when they had been installed. Candice led, for now.

“Mr Strachan?”

He was a big man, but not fat, very like my husband in build, but lacking so much of his poise. Blake always seemed to be on the balls of his feet, ready to react, while Neil gave the impression of folding inwards. He looked up from his till, and smiled, and that was when I saw exactly what Maddy must have seen.

An utterly open face, with the most amazingly gentle hazel eyes; a little wave of hatred towards Forbes swept over me.

“Are you the police? I mean, Lexie’s friends, and Enfys’s?”

“That’s us. I’m Detective Constable Warren, and this is Detective Sergeant Sutton. Um, Candice---Diane, or Di”

“I’m Neil. Thank you for coming. Have you spoken to Mike yet?”

A little flicker from Candice, but she simply went with the flow.

“Not yet, Neil. We ‘re here to do our best to help with your loss, for now. We’ll move on to Mike once we’ve dealt with that. I am afraid this is going to be a long job”

“I gave Lexie copies of everything I had”

“And they have helped immensely, Neil. We already have some lines of enquiry underway—no, I can’t say what. But we have to sign and list all that you have for us, so it’s going to be a long day, or days. Where do you want us?”

“If you are here for days, where are you staying?”

I recognised Candice’s laugh as forced, but then I knew her.

“Premier Inn, Neil. We call it the Purple Palace---what have I said?”

His face had fallen at her words, but he dug hard for a smile.

“Please come in, and I’ll shut up shop. If you had asked, we… I have two spare bedrooms”

I returned his smile, hopefully in a more genuine fashion than his offering.

“That would have been handy, Neil, but we have to be careful of perceptions. That’s why Lexie is no longer involved directly. Now, something about our choice of hotel disturbed you—sorry, it’s the way I am. Goes with the job. Is there something we should know about the place? Should we look for somewhere else?”

He shook his head, but it wasn’t delivered with any emphasis.

“I don’t know anything about the hotel, Diane. It’s just something Maddy used to say. When we first met, she was riding a little motor scooter. She called it the ‘Purple Pixie’. Little bit of triggering. I’ll be fine. I’ll just do the locks and shutter, then I’ll show you upstairs”

The shutter in question was an electrically powered roller, looking extremely robust, and the locks were multiple. Candice watched the process, eyes narrowed.

“What if you get a fire, Neil?”

“Push bar door through here. This is the exhibition room”

He waved at an archway that revealed a room entirely without furniture, but with multiple spotlights.

“We met at one of her exhibitions. One of the big differences between us, really. I sold my pictures almost entirely over the internet, but she had proper events. We…”

He went away from us once again, eyes damp, before excavating that very worn smile once again.

“Our first joint event was after we came back from a trip to Durham, and a short visit to Northumberland. She did a lot of colour shots, I stayed mostly in monochrome. It was very successful. We… Come upstairs, and I will put the kettle on”

There were framed photographs everywhere, and the subjects were incredibly varied. On one wall, for example, was a black and white silhouette of a naked woman lying on her side, and next to it a full-colour shot of Enfys doing something extremely precarious on very smooth-looking rock. Elsewhere were pictures of buildings, stalactites, rock faces, even fossils, and every single one was perfectly sharp and, to be honest, fascinating in the quantity of detail revealed. My odd mind was very nearly sucked into them, a visual siren song. One particular study, in colour, appeared to show nothing but overlapping flakes of rust, the edges almost fractal in the way they wrapped back on themselves, and…

“Di?”

“Um. Sorry. Got a bit distracted”

Neil gave me a surprisingly direct look.

“I have a whole collection of those. They’re from the Angel of the North..”

He was off into a flow of excessive detail once again, and I revised my opinion, because I couldn’t decide just then whether he was on the edge, or already over it and falling free.

‘Freak goes splat’

My personal and professional dislike of ‘Nigel’ was hitting a peak, but I suspected it was actually one of those false summits, where something even higher and nastier was lurking just over the crest.

He had tea, in a proper pot, plus all the trimmings, such as strainer, sugar bowl and milk jug. He asked our preferences, poured, smiled, explained that it was the way Maddy had done things.

And wept.

We spent two nights in the Purple Palace in the end, as there was so much to catalogue. We finally set off back for Cardiff with a boot almost full of potential exhibits, and a surprising quantity of information about a man called Michael Rhodes.

Our forensic people and SOCO went to town on our bagged originals, which was a delight, but we already had them well-trained, if not actually house-broken. The main problem was a simple one: there were no prior offences recorded against Forbes, so we had no DNA on record for comparisons.

Alun had a word with Sammy yet again, on a complete hunch. I collared him in the greasy for a debrief (or rather a ‘Me Sarge you DC tell me what you’re up to!’). He was smugger than I had ever seen him, which was a difficult hill to climb.

“Simples, Di. First thing was to check where the clone plate lives, legally like”

“We already did that, Al”

“Yeah, but you didn’t trawl the street for any possible links, did you?”

“Sorry?”

“What does our current favourite turd do, Di?”

“He’s a business efficiency manager, whatever the fuck that is”

“He is. And his employers have a website. And the website has testimonials”

“And?”

“The cloned plate belongs to the HR lead for a company that Nigel Forbes did a job for”

“Oh!”

He did the nail-polishing mime, before simply saying, “And…”

“Oh, stop teasing!”

All the playfulness dropped away like unwanted ballast.

“I got Bev to authorise a bit of snidery, and paid a visit to West Mids force, just on the off chance. Home Alone for Clone is York, but you’ll remember I said he might be using the M6 toll road. I got the Brummies to do a trawl for serial non-payers, and guess who came up?”

“I am guessing it wasn’t the real plate. And so?”

“Had another word with the ‘Appen as like’ lot, and they have had complaints galore from the owner of the real plate”

“What do you have for us, Al? Summed up?”

He sighed, putting his cup down and staring into it for a while before starting again, eyes still down.

“You’re not the only one who has connections, Di. And Lexie isn’t the only one who kept in touch up North. That Sue, she has been amazing with my Lyn. I have met Alys a few times as well…”

He tossed back the last of his tea.

“Cold. Arse. Di?”

“Yeah?”

“No hyperbole here, okay? This cunt took a man’s wife from him, all for shitz’n’lolz. Here I am, not knowing how much longer I will still have my own lover. Pardon me if I get a little focussed. I rang Alys once Lexie had given us the case, and she gave me her own opinion of Neil. Sunshine out of arses isn’t how it is, but she loves him deeply, and that’s a recommendation that I can’t ignore. I want this fucker, Di”

“What have you got so far, love?”

He looked me in the eye, finally.

“I have got the fact that, right now, he is still using the toll road, or at least that number plate is. We get the right time, he hits the ANPR, and we prime West Mids to stop him. Enough offences there to get his DNA lifted, and of course we’ll get a fucking match. Once that’s done, we get to talk to him. Our way”

Kissing a colleague in the greasy wasn’t the done thing, so I simply squeezed his hand, hoping I could draw some of his pain.

Back in the office, though, he was more than ready to brief the rest of our team, and as ever, he either found his irreverent sense of humour again, or forced a reasonable facsimile of it. We ended up far more upbeat than we had been, when faced with a pile of information we couldn’t turn into evidence, at least not so far.

Two weeks later, and the call came in from West Mids traffic.

“Hello, can I speak to Sergeant Sutton, please?”

“Speaking”

“Hello, Sarge. I’m Dev Choudhury from West Midlands Traffic support. You tasked us with a stop. White Range Rover?”

“Ah! What have you got?”

“Pretty straightforward, from our end. Cloned plates to evade the tolls, and more gob than a gobby thing”

“Sorry?”

“Mister Forbes is looking to stand as a councillor for Reform and we are all part of a conspiracy to destroy, et cetera. Oh, and he’s a Freeman of the Land”

“Oh for fuck’s sake! Really?”

“Yup. Complete with ALL the usual shite about ‘personal conveyances’ and the Magna Carta”

“I am so sorry”

“Not at all. He’s wonderful entertainment value--- they always are. We had one a few months back, full of the usual crap about compacts with etc, and when he got convicted, he actually got a custodial, Went from cockiness to pleading in zero time. Begged for community service instead, and the head beak simply says that as he had clearly stated several times, that he doesn’t recognise the authority of the court, he might recognise the authority of a locked door”

“You got his DNA, though? Our man’s, that is?”

“Oh yes. Could I ask a serious question?”

“Go ahead”

“Okay. What the hell do you have him in the frame for?”

I let my breath out slowly. Play nicely, woman.

“Things that are neither nice nor legal, Dev. When I say ‘not nice’, I mean in capital letters”

“Oh. Oh fuck. Bad?”

“Very. If we get a result, I will let you know. Least we can do”

“Right. Gob shut time, then?”

“Please. Sorry”

“No need. He really needs a good slap, so I hope you have one coming”

“We hope so too. Can’t say any more”

We ended the call, and I looked round at those team members who were actually on an office day.

“West Mids have his DNA. And I think I have a route to Mr Sedgewick’s people”

Jon was nodding, which caught my eye, as he was far from stupid.

“Jonny boy?”

“Stop that, he says in reflex. Going to take a guess here, but it is an informed one”

“In what way?”

“I have found his main social media accounts