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the wild Celt Detective Sergeant Donovan suffered from punishingly high expectations of himself. He didn’t need driving. He needed steering.
    With a little prompting he told the story again, starting with the robbery at the garage and ending with the van in flames outside Chevening Parish Church. Anti-climax had set in, leaving him flat and intolerant of all the fuss.
    When Liz realized she was sitting there with her mouth open she shut it and tried to think of something intelligent to say. ‘Er – has the gun been recovered?’
    Shapiro was impressed. The first time he heard this story, an awareness of how closely Donovan had shaved disaster left him incapable of coherent thought for several minutes. ‘SOCO have been over the van with a fine-tooth comb but they didn’t find anything that might once have been a handgun.’
    â€˜Then he dumped it,’ said Donovan, shortly, as if someone had accused him of something. ‘Somewhere on the road between Kumani’s and Chevening. It was dark, he could have dropped the window and slung it out anywhere – I wouldn’t have seen, there were whole stretches where he was just a couple of tail-lights in the distance. Some of the time I couldn’t see him at all, I was following by guess and by God.’
    Shapiro nodded. ‘Well, if that’s what he did we should find it.’
    Head down, Donovan growled something sotto voce. This was a tactical manoeuvre: if a senior officer asked him to repeat himself it was hard then to complain that he was speaking out of turn.
    Shapiro knew the rules of this little game well enough. It was one of the small liberties he allowed to Donovan in order to save his energy for stamping on the larger ones. He vented a weary sigh. ‘Sorry, Sergeant, what was that?’
    Donovan looked up, his lips tight. ‘I said, we better had. I don’t want there to be any doubt about this. It was an armed robbery. Not a toy, not a replica – that was a real gun. He wouldn’t have knocked me out with a toy; and Ash Kumani would have kicked him down Cambridge Road if there’d been any question in his mind what Mikey was pointing at him. It was an armed robbery, he decked me to get away, and he could have killed the woman in the car. I want that gun found. I don’t want anyone saying, Well, maybe it was real and maybe it wasn’t and anyway we can’t prove it so how about we charge him with assault and driving without due care and attention?’
    Shapiro understood his anger. It was one of the most offensive things that could happen to a police officer, to know – not to suspect, not to believe, but to know – that a crime had been committed and to be denied a successful prosecution by a break in the line of evidence.
    It didn’t depend on what you knew but on what you could prove. The Crown Prosecution Service hated losing cases, if they weren’t confident of a conviction they wouldn’t proceed. Placid middle-aged policemen with grandchildren and a liking for country walks could be reduced to impotent fury by the sight of some cocky young thug back on the street because a break in the evidence allowed another interpretation of the facts, if viewed from the right angle and with a following wind. It was desperately frustrating. You told yourself you’d get them next time, but it didn’t make it any easier to see them swagger away. It was one of those occasions when the fact that police arms had to be authorized and issued, not just pulled from a holster, saved a lot of not very worthy lives and some rather more valuable careers.
    â€˜I’ve got a dozen people out looking,’ said Shapiro. ‘They know it’s important, they’ll find it if they can. At least we know where it has to be – if he threw it from the car it went out the driver’s window and ended up south of the road. It’s just over three miles from Kumani’s to