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s’Església Vella – the Old Church Point – and heading towards the bay known as Ses Roquettes.
    Already his head was beginning to clear.
    Rik Dean had always wanted to be a detective superintendent, his career goal to be a Senior Investigating Officer on FMIT. He had never imagined it would be as stressful as it turned out to be.
    Being in charge of murder investigations was one thing, and he revelled in that. It was the other dross that came with the rank and role that dragged him down. The constant pressure from the hierarchy to get better results, the endless strategic and tactical meetings, locally and nationally, and then stuff like the Women’s Institute and other such bodies constantly sucking him dry of time.
    He often wondered how his predecessor had coped.
    As much as Dean was horrified by the enormity of the brutal call-out to the killing of Craig Alford and his family – and Dean knew Alford well – there was also a frisson of excitement in him, because he knew this was a very big deal indeed. The execution of a police officer and his family by what seemed to be a professional hitman. Dean was savvy enough to know that a successful conclusion to it could define his career – just as failure could.
    But Dean was in no mood to fail.
    He had decided to run the investigation out of the force Training Centre at Hutton Hall, to commandeer a couple of classrooms and convert them into a major incident room. He could have chosen to run it from Preston police station, which was geographically closer to Alford’s house, but for the sake of a few miles, the Training Centre offered easier access for vehicles coming and going, and specialists, such as the intel unit, were pretty much on tap.
    Once he had done what he could at the scene, then entrusting it to an experienced crime scene manager, Dean returned to his office in the FMIT building at the Training Centre – a converted, refurbished accommodation block – and set about pulling his murder squad together while, with a DI, board-blasting the initial investigative strategy.
    By ten a.m. on the morning after the Alford family murder he had secured two interconnecting classrooms on top of a training block close to FMIT, one of which would serve as a briefing/tasking room, and a mixed bag of cops had assembled in front of him.
    Dean had watched them all filter in, trying to remain calm and composed on the surface and also wondering where Jerry Tope had got to. Dean knew Tope’s computer-based investigatory skills would be invaluable.
    He rang Tope’s mobile number from his smart phone and got no response; it, and Tope’s home number too, clicked on to voicemail. Dean left a terse message on both – a ‘Where the fuck are you, Jerry?’ kind of terseness – then dialled through to the intel unit based in the headquarters building a short distance away. No one there had seen Jerry and his desk, apparently, looked the same as it had done when he’d left it: pristine.
    â€˜Fuck is he?’ Dean muttered to himself and looked up across the gaggle of officers, all waiting patiently with serious faces, some sitting on the chairs provided, some lounging against the walls.
    Two of their own had been taken and all wanted to catch the killer.
    â€˜Good morning, ladies and gentlemen,’ Dean said after clearing his throat. ‘I’d like to say welcome but you all know why you’re here, and welcome doesn’t seem an appropriate word to use. Two of our police family, DCI Craig Alford and his wife, the very popular DC Carrie Alford, and their two lovely children have been brutally – callously – murdered and it is our job to catch a very dangerous killer …’
    Dean stopped his opening, unrehearsed, speech.
    The door at the back of the classroom had opened and someone was edging through the assembled officers saying quietly, ‘Excuse me, pardon me,’ until he reached the