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time trying to summon up the dead. They don’t want to believe their police officers are standing on the ramparts of castles like Hamlet talking to his father’s ghost. Understand what I’m saying?’
    ‘I understand, yes. But I don’t agree with you. Our job is to solve crimes. We have to use whatever means are at our disposal.’
    She shook her head. ‘We’re never going to solve every crime, and we have to accept that. What we have to do is inspire public confidence. Make people feel safe in their homes, and on the streets.’
    ‘That’s such bullshit,’ Grace said, ‘and you know that! You know fine well you can massage the crime statistics any way you want.’ No sooner had he said it than he regretted his words.
    She gave him a thin, wintry smile. ‘Get the Government to give us another hundred million pounds a year and we will eradicate crime in Sussex. In the absence of that all we can do is spread our resources as thinly and as far as they will go.’
    ‘Mediums are cheap,’ Grace said.
    ‘Not when they damage our credibility.’ She looked down at the papers. ‘When they jeopardize a court case they become more than we can afford. Do you hear me?’
    ‘Loudly, if not clearly.’ He couldn’t help it, the insolence just came out. She was irritating him. Something chauvinistic inside him that he couldn’t help, made it harder for him to accept a dressing-down from a woman than from a man.
    ‘Let me spell it out. You’re lucky to still have a job this morning. The Chief is not a happy bunny. He’s so angry he’s threatening to take you out of the public arena for ever, and have you chained to a desk for the rest of your career. Is that what you want?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Then go back to being a police officer, not a flake.’
     
     
13
     
    For the first time since he had joined the Force, Roy Grace had recently begun wondering whether he should ever have become a policeman. From earliest childhood it was all he had wanted to be, and in his teens he had scarcely even considered any other career.
    His father, Jack, had risen to the rank of Detective Inspector, and some of the older officers around still talked about him, with great affection. Grace had been in thrall to him as a child, loved to hear his stories, to go out with him — sometimes in a police car, or down to the station. When he was a child, his father’s life had seemed so much more adventurous and glamorous than the dull lives most of his friends’ dads lived.
    Grace had been addicted to cop shows on television, to books about detectives and cops of every kind — from Sherlock Holmes to Ed McBain. He had a memory that bordered on photographic, he loved puzzles, and he was physically strong. And from all he saw and heard from his father, there seemed to be a teamwork and camaraderie in police life that really appealed.
    But now, on a day like this, he realized that being a police officer was less about doing things to the best of your abilities and more about conforming to some preordained level of mediocrity. In this modern politically correct world you could be a law enforcement officer at the peak of your career one moment and a political pawn the next.
    His latest promotion, making him the second-youngest Detective Superintendent ever in the Sussex Police Force, and which just three months ago had so thrilled him, was fast turning out to be a poisoned chalice.
    It had meant moving from the buzz of Brighton police station in the heart of the town, where most of his friends were, out to the relative quiet of the former factory on an industrial estate on the edge of the city, which had recently been refurbished to house the headquarters of Sussex CID.
    You could retire from the force on a full pension after thirty years. No matter how tough it got, if he just stuck it out he would be financially set up for life. That was not how he wanted to view his job, his career. At least, not normally.
    But today was different. Today was a