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capitalism, and thus become martyrs to the movement. And so the police had become involved, in order to remove the protesters peacefully before one had his arm trimmed off accidentally on purpose. Terry did not envy the Chief Constable his responsibility.
    ‘Daft buggers!’ said Easby contemptuously. ‘Thousands of jobs, this place’ll bring.’ He drove on, past the village of portacabins where the contractor’s workmen and security guards lived, fenced in with their guard dogs. Terry observed it with distaste.
    ‘I don’t see why they couldn’t build it in town,’ he mused. ‘You wait, son - in six months this’ll be one vast car park, and another dozen shops in the city centre’ll go out of business. Soon the whole city’ll be boarded up or vandalised.’
    ‘All the more work for us, then,’ said Harry philosophically, looking ahead for the farm entrance. ‘You sound like one of these tree people, sir.’
    ‘And you sound like a taxi driver,’ Bateson snapped. ‘Just drive, constable, will you.’
    ‘Sir.’
    Terry regretted the words, but made no effort to call them back. This was happening more and more, he knew - he was becoming impatient, crusty, like all the worst officers he’d known. It was as though his personality was changing. It was attracting wry comments among his colleagues. When he tried to make amends, it just made matters worse. They seemed to fall over themselves offering sympathy. ‘So sorry to hear about your, wife, sir ...is there anything I can do? ... come out for a drink ... terrible thing about your wife ...’
    Two years ago it had been so different. Terry had seemed able to square the magic circle - hardworking, successful, ambitious, but also popular with his fellow officers. His aim to get the DCI’s job when Jim Carter retired was supported, he believed, by most of his colleagues.
    And then in one night it was all destroyed. Two fifteen year old boys had hot-wired a Jaguar, blasted it up to eighty miles an hour, and smashed it head-on into his wife’s Clio. It had taken four hours to cut Mary’s lifeless body from the wreckage. It would take Terry the rest of his life to cut the image from his mind.
    For two weeks he had been in despair. His sister had come to care for him and his two daughters. The Police Federation counsellor advised him that grief was natural, and that it was no sin for a man to cry. But Terry had cried already and it didn’t seem to help, it just felt painful and frightened him. So he drank most of a bottle of whisky in one night, and the rest the day after. What happened in between he couldn’t remember, but it made his sister tighten her mouth and his children look afraid. That, more than anything, purged him. After the funeral, where he was ashamed by his pounding headache, he sat down with his two little girls and talked to them quietly about the future.
    They wanted to know who would look after them. He said he would, of course. He would leave the police. But to his surprise, this idea seemed to scare them; perhaps because it scared him, too. He knew nothing else, had never wanted to. And so his sister and the counsellor advised him about childcare, and Trude, a young nanny from Norway, entered their home.
    She was cheerful and active, eager to help and to please. His girls took to her at once.  After a halting expression of sympathy in broken English she didn’t speak much about their mother, but entered enthusiastically into what, to her, were the fascinating foreign details of their everyday English lives. She was a messy but surprisingly good cook, making things like waffles and meatballs and rice porridge which they had never tasted before. She seemed content to be with them, undemanding. Above all she was genuinely interested in children and had no reason to feel sad. When she had been there two days the children went back to school, and the week after that Terry went back to work.  Life, of a sort, began again.
    But his ambition,