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‘Not quite. Let's move on to Stephen Kenning. Bit more straightforward, that one. No one likes a grass. He'd sold Kerridge and Boyle down the river on that drugs deal. Even if there was no risk of them being implicated, they must have taken a financial hit. A decent enough motive for icing Kenning. But it turns out there's a bit more. Kenning is also a Hulme alumnus. The original school of hard fucking knocks. Turns out that Kenning and Boyle were bosom buddies as teenagers. They'd drifted apart over the years. But I'm told that Boyle still thought of Kenning as a mate, pretty much up the point where he shafted the drugs deal.'

‘Did Kenning know he was shafting Boyle?'

‘Who knows? But the effect's the same, either way. From what I know of Pete Boyle, there's no way he wouldn't have taken in personally.'

‘Okay, so Boyle had a personal link with Tallent and Kenning. What about the third guy, Sheerin?'

‘Surprise, surprise. Same again. Another graduate of the University of Hulme. Rough contemporary of Boyle's. Interesting one, this, though. Couldn't find much connection at first. No evidence they'd known each other. So I did more digging. Eventually found an older guy who'd been mates with Boyle's mother. Single parent. Tough as nails, by all accounts. Father had fucked off before Boyle was born, assuming that she ever knew who he was. Anyway, rumour was that Sheerin's old man had had some sort of fling with Boyle's mum. Treated her badly. Thought of himself as a hard man, but got short shift when he tried any rough stuff. So ran off with the housekeeping money or some such. Old codger I spoke to wasn't too clear on the details, but reckoned that Boyle would have reason not to be too enamoured of the old bastard. Or of his son.'

‘So you're saying that all these three, one way or another, had bad blood with Boyle? Sounds a bit tenuous as a motive for murder.'

‘Of course. But that wasn't the motive for the murders. That was just the reason why these three particular poor buggers got chosen.'

‘So what is this? Boyle gets out of prison. Sees his hoped-for empire beginning to disintegrate. Barbarians at the gate, all that. So sends out some warning messages. That the idea?' Brennan looked sceptical.

‘Pretty much. These three were well chosen. Whoever employed Tallent would be one of the interlopers into Kerridge's lucrative sex-trade operations. Sheerin was doing business for one of the gangs who've been drifting into Kerridge's traditional territories in Cheetham Hill. As for Kenning – well, like I say, no one loves a grass. There've been a few other incidents as well, less serious than these three. Premises getting torched. The odd beating up. One or two serious Saturday night injuries.'

Brennan's expression hadn't changed. ‘You realise that serious Saturday night injuries aren't that uncommon in central Manchester? It's a trend even our lot have managed to spot.'

‘Yeah, unlike any of this.' Salter bent down from the table and lifted a laptop bag on to the table. He unzipped it, fumbled inside for a moment, and then pulled out a plastic wallet stuffed with papers. ‘I've been through a stack of those cases. Some I've dismissed. A couple of the fires look like genuine accidents or insurance jobs. Some of the beatings are just muggings or domestics of one sort or another. But I'm left with maybe eight or nine incidents, apart from our three biggies, which I could link back to Pete Boyle.' He pushed the wallet across the table towards Brennan. ‘Have a look.'

Brennan pulled out the papers and flicked quickly through them, stopping every now and then to read one of the reports more carefully. Eventually, he looked up. ‘Okay. I don't deny it's interesting. But Boyle's a big fish in this pond. You could probably link anything back to him if you tried hard enough.'

‘Three murder victims who grew up within half a mile of him? One went to school with him? Another's dad screwed Boyle's mum, in more ways than one? Hell of a coincidence.'

Brennan nodded. ‘Let's say you've convinced me. Or half-convinced me. Where are we going with this?'

‘This is why you're here. The secondment. It's why I wanted an experienced investigator. Someone local, with decent inside knowledge. Someone who could pull the right levers, if need be, with the local police.'

‘I'm flattered,' Brennan said. ‘Though I'm not sure you've got the right man. If I pull any levers at the moment, it's likely just to bring a bucket of crap down on my head. I'm not exactly flavour of the month.'

‘They'll forgive you soon enough once you're not under their feet as a permanent fucking reminder.' Salter leaned back in his chair and watched Brennan carefully. ‘I think we've got full-scale fucking gang warfare going on here. Boyle's taking out or warning off all his competition, one by one, step by step. It's diverse enough that it slips under the radar of you local plods – here, North Wales, Derbyshire, wherever the hell it is. But it's targeted so that no one on the receiving end of it will have much doubt what it means. And as an added bonus he's settling a few old scores on the way.'

‘What about Kenning? The grass. He wasn't competition.'

‘You reckon? Word was that Kenning didn't turn Queen's evidence out of the goodness of his heart, but because he'd been promised a nice little nest-egg by someone who wanted to corner the market.'

‘I saw the place he was living,' Brennan countered. ‘Must have been a fucking small nest-egg.'

‘It's a sad world. People don't always deliver on their promises. One of our dirty little secrets. That the life of a superannuated supergrass isn't all it's cracked up to be.' Salter pushed back his chair and stood up, in the manner of one indicating that the meeting was coming to an end. ‘So. You game for it?'

‘I'm still not entirely clear what
it
is,' Brennan said.

‘We're trying to build a case against Boyle. It's been a slow process. Not least because we fucked up so spectacularly last time. So this time we want to do it absolutely by the book. I want you to act as evidence officer. Work through what we've got. See if it stacks up. Tell us where the gaps are and what we need to do to fill them. I can give you some intelligence resource from my team, though not much. We'll give you authorisation to work with the local plods, so you can finagle any information you can from them. Though good luck with that.'

‘I'm an experienced investigator. But I've not worked in your environment before. You must have people around who've got more of a track record in that kind of work.'

Salter nodded, smiling, as if this was a question that he'd been waiting for. ‘Maybe. But we're stretched to the fucking limit. I've a national team, trying to juggle major operations from here to sodding Portsmouth. Half my lot are so wet behind the ears they've barely been weaned, and most of the other half are the kinds of alcoholics and deadbeats who couldn't swing a return back to proper policing. I've got a clutch of officers working undercover that I'm not even supposed to talk about. And I'm not even based up here. I spend half my life stuck in the fucking ivory tower in Westminster filling in forms and writing reports so my superiors can prove to the politicians that we're not squandering their tax money on liaison trips to the fucking Bahamas, or whatever it is that they think we do when they're not looking.' He paused and took a breath. It sounded like a prepared speech, or at least a speech that Salter had delivered before. ‘That's why I need someone like you, up here, who can get some real nitty-gritty work done.'

Brennan pulled the wallet of papers back towards him. ‘Okay. I'll give it a shot.' He looked up at Salter, with what looked like genuine amusement on his face. ‘After all, given what I've come from, it's not like I'm got much fucking option, is it?'

The whole thing felt wrong. Too soon. Too risky. Too ill-prepared. Shit, the last time she'd done this they'd spent months preparing her for it. They'd had the legend worked out to the last detail. Every minute of her fictional past. Every last nuance of her character and personality. She'd had an answer worked out to every possible question that might be thrown at her.

They'd put her through exercise after exercise. Memory tests. Role playing. Even that bloody farce where they'd snatched her from the airport car park and terrorised the life out of her. By the time she'd hit the street, she'd been note-perfect.

And now, what? Just over three weeks of scrambled briefings, cobbled-together documentation, hurried liaisons with informants who clearly thought they had better things to do that make her life any easier. And here she was, sitting outside the head honcho's office about to stick her head firmly on the block. The whole thing felt so bloody
amateurish
.

The smart-suited young secretary emerged again from the main man's office and regarded Marie with a look of disdain. ‘I'm terribly sorry,' she said, with no obvious sign of sincerity. ‘He really won't be much longer.'

The secretary didn't bother to offer any explanation for the delay, but Marie hadn't really expected any. She'd already assumed, perhaps unfairly, that this man, McGrath, was most likely just sitting in there with his feet up reading the
Daily Star
. For all that she felt unprepared, Marie had seen through this place immediately.

She smiled at the secretary. McGrath doubtless called her his PA. ‘Not a problem,' Marie said. ‘I appreciate how busy Mr McGrath must be.' She smiled warmly at the young woman, who now smiled uneasily back, perhaps growing conscious that her assumptions about Marie might not be entirely justified.

That was the only consolation, Marie thought. She might feel as if she'd been tossed carelessly into the deep end, but she'd already seen enough to know that, for the moment at least, she wasn't out of her depth. Bunch of cowboys, she thought, glancing around at the large secretary's office. All show, and no substance.

It had taken her a few minutes to register the fact when she'd first arrived. On the surface, it had all looked impressive enough. A neat little unit in a serviced office block just off the main drag near the centre of Chester. Half a mile and a world away from the city of Roman remains and bijou fashion shops, but it probably still had what the property agents would describe as a prestigious address. The Victrix Business Park, for Christ's sake.

Inside, though, it wasn't quite right. The place was an old factory that had clearly been converted hurriedly. Okay, perhaps not quite as hurriedly as she'd been converted into Maggie Yates – and, come to that, couldn't they have found a more prestigious name for her as well? – but more hurriedly than the building's pretensions required. She was no expert, but even sitting here Marie could see that the wallpaper was badly applied, the paintwork sloppy, the carpet cheap and already beginning to wear. Even the office furniture looked outdated. Not, she suspected, the kind of image that McGrath was hoping to project.

There were other signs, too. As the secretary had led her in from the chilly unattended lobby, Marie had glimpsed the rear courtyard through one of the windows. A miniature junkyard – an old fridge, a discarded sink unit, a broken table lined with paint pots, all overgrown with weeds. If the offices had been recently converted, she might have thought it was just waiting to be tidied, but this place was no longer new.

Even the staff weren't up to scratch. There had been no one at the reception desk in the lobby, and no response when Marie had pressed the electric bell on the desk. After a while, she'd used her mobile to phone the number she'd been given. The secretary had answered the call and, after a few minutes, had bustled officiously through into the lobby. Marie suspected that the secretary and McGrath himself were the only occupants of this part of the building.

She knew that these thoughts were partly just a displacement activity, a way of not thinking too hard about the fragility of the ice beneath her. Salter had been full of reassurance and had even wheeled out Winsor, the psychologist, to confirm just how emotionally resilient she would be in the face of diversity. Or something like that. Winsor had spouted his familiar professional gobbledygook and she'd nodded politely, knowing by then that it was all going to happen anyway.

Jesus, then there was Liam. When she'd finally broken the news that she was going back out into the field, he'd responded better than she'd feared. He'd taken the news calmly, shrugged, told her that, yes, of course she had to keep things going at work. He absolutely understood that. He wouldn't want it any other way.

She'd enjoyed a few seconds of relief at his reaction before she became concerned. At first, she thought that Liam was reverting to the passive-aggressive style he'd perfected in the early days of his illness. But this felt different. This felt sincere. And that raised questions about what was going on in Liam's head. There were times, already, when he seemed like a different person.

She'd tried to put all that from her mind as she'd made her way up here. She and Liam had danced round the issue of her departure, talking about the practicalities rather than the emotional impact of their separation. The practicalities had been challenging enough. She'd had to ensure that a suitable care regime was in place for Liam. He was already barely capable making his way around the house, even in the wheelchair, and was no longer able to look after himself reliably. He had two carers, funded by social services and supplied through some agency, who had been coming in twice a day to prepare him a meal and, essentially, check that he was okay. After a little negotiation, they'd managed to add another visit in the evening while Marie was away. Marie had had the impression that the main carer, Sue, hadn't been all that impressed by the idea of Liam being left alone overnight. But what other option did Marie have?

‘Mrs Yates?'