Dead Simple

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 pre-ordained 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 real downer. A reality-check day. Circumstances changed, he was thinking, as he sat hunched over his desk, ignoring the pinging of incoming emails on his computer screen, munching an egg and cress brown sandwich, and staring at court transcripts of the Suresh Hossain trial in front of him. Life never stands still. Sometimes the changes were good, sometimes less than good. In little over a year’s time he would be forty. His hair was going grey.
    And his new office was too small.
    The three dozen vintage cigarette lighters that were his prize collection hunched together on the ledge between the front of his desk and the window which, unlike the fine view from Alison Vosper’s office, looked down onto the parking lot and the cell block beyond. Dominating the wall behind him was the large, round wooden clock that had been a prop in the fictitious police station in The Bill . Sandy had bought him it for his twenty-sixth birthday.
    Beneath it was a stuffed seven-pound, six-ounce brown trout which he kept beneath the clock and used to give him a joke he could crack to detectives working under him, about patience and big fish.
    Lined up on either side and slightly cramping it were several framed certificates, and a group photograph captioned ‘Police Staff College Bramshill. Management of Serious and Series Crimes. 1997’, and two cartoons of him in the police ops room, drawn by a colleague who had missed his true vocation. The opposite wall was taken up by bookshelves bulging with part of his collection of books on the occult, and filing cabinets.
    His L-shaped desk was cluttered by his computer, overflowing in-and out-trays, BlackBerry, separate piles of correspondence, some orderly, most less so, and the latest edition of the magazine with a bad pun of a title, Fingerprint Whorld . Rising from the mess was a framed quotation: ‘We don’t rise to the level of our abilities, we fall to the level of our excuses.’
    The rest of the floor space was occupied by a television and video player, a circular table, four chairs and piles of files and loose paperwork, and his leather go-bag, containing his crime-scene kit. His briefcase sat open on the table; his mobile, dictating machine and a bunch of transcripts he had taken home with him last night all lay beside it.
    He dropped half his sandwich in the bin. No appetite. He sipped his mug of coffee, checked the latest emails, then logged back on to the Sussex Police site and stared at the list of files he had inherited as part of his promotion.
    Each file contained the details of an unsolved murder. It represented a pile of about twenty boxes of files, maybe even more, stacked on an office floor, or bulging out of cupboards, or locked up, gathering mould in a damp police garage in a station in the area where the murder happened. The files contained scene-of-crime photographs, forensic reports, bagged evidence, witness statements, court transcripts, separated into orderly bundles and secured with coloured ribbon. This was part of his new brief, to dig back into the county’s unsolved murders, liaise with the CID division where the crime happened, looking for anything that might have changed in the intervening years