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flatten me.” She pinned her most amiable smile in place, climbed the stone steps, and tapped Barking Mad Barclay on the shoulder. “Excuse me. Hello?”
    It had the desired effect, in that he stopped what he was doing and peered around at her. He had a Zapata mustache that was the height of fashion around 1975, currently clotted with blood, and tiny, bleary eyes looking in slightly different directions. “What the footling hell do you want?” He did not say footling. And he spoke with a Glasgow accent that he affected only when he’d been drinking. Budgen knew for a fact that he’d been born in Kidderminster.
    Hazel proffered a tissue. “Do you know you’ve cut your forehead?”
    He looked at the tissue. He looked at Hazel. He looked at the floodlit obelisk, which had a bloodstain the size of a football on it. “No! Really?”
    “We ought to get that looked at for you. You don’t want it to scar.”
    Budgen was watching with amazement, admiration, and deep disquiet. She was talking to Barking Mad Barclay as if he was normal—as if he’d tripped on the steps of the war memorial and hurt himself on the obelisk. The constable had no idea what would happen next. Probably what usually happened when a police officer approached Barclay armed with anything less than rocket-propelled grenades. But he thought there was just a chance that it might work. That Barclay would accept the offer of her hankie and go with her to see the police surgeon. If that happened, Hazel Best would be the toast of Meadowvale Police Station. Even Wayne Budgen might get a little reflected glory.
    Alas, the remarkable doesn’t happen nearly as often as the blindingly obvious. Barclay slurred, “Go footle yersel’,” and swatted Hazel as if swatting a fly. She landed in the middle of the Garden of Remembrance with a ringing in her ears and no clear idea of which way was up.
    After which they did it Constable Budgen’s way and got backup. Hazel took no further part in the arrest. Back at Meadowvale, Sergeant Murchison made her a cup of tea—well, fetched her one from the machine in the corridor—had the police surgeon look at her, took a photograph of her bruises for the report, then sent her home.

 
    CHAPTER 5
    B ARKING MAD Barclay was known in Meadowvale as a three-hander. Except when he was worked up, like now, when you tried to round up the front row of the Division rugby team in order to tackle him.
    Except like right now, when there was someone in there with him, taking the brunt of all that anger, when the first officer on the scene hit the alarm in passing, threw open the cell door, and threw himself at the big man without waiting for anything. It happened to be Sergeant Murchison. It could have been any of them. He knew he’d get hurt. He knew he could get injured quite badly. It didn’t have to matter. If he waited, even a few seconds, he was going to have a dead man in his cells. Already, in the time it had taken him to run here from his desk in the outer office, the shrill yells of terror and the bubbling ones of pain had been cut off, leaving only the deep animal grunts of effort.
    Donald Murchison had seen a lot in twenty years of police work. He thought he was ready for what he was going to see when he went through the cell door. But he wasn’t. The place was an abattoir.
    He was lucky that, by and large, the police station was staffed by people just like him. They grumbled and whinged, they gossiped, they backbit, they clock-watched and counted off the days to their pension; but when the shit hit the fan, without pausing to think of the cost, they supported one another with everything they had. Murchison had barely got a hand on the berserker in his cell before four colleagues were piling through the door behind him, grabbing anything that moved and hanging on to it for grim death. One of them grabbed Murchison, and apologized breathlessly before shifting his grasp.
    With five of them hanging on to him like bulldogs