Read Innocent Blood for Free Online

them even though he could have been ‘an exceptional role model’. So what? Those who had the gumption to learn from him did, and the others didn’t deserve to. What’s more, the good ones wanted to continue working for him and he had no interest in the others. So he’d shrugged H-B’s words aside, crossed his legs and kept his mouth shut. The less he said, he figured, the sooner the wretched meeting would be over.
    Perhaps if he had managed to keep to his rule they wouldn’t have argued, but how was he supposed to sit there and listen to the garbage that the ACC moved on to next?
    ‘Try to celebrate success more, Andrew.’ It sounded like a phrase he’d picked up from one of the management textbooks that filled his bookcase.
    ‘What do you mean? I take them to the pub when we make a good arrest and I don’t charge the round to expenses like some I could mention.’
    ‘Yes, but you don’t linger there, do you?’
    ‘Trust me, the last thing my team wants is some stuffed shirt breathing down their necks trying to be pally after they’ve had a few. I always stay for a couple of hours but after that they’d rather be left well alone; I know I would.’
    ‘A quick visit to the pub is hardly an appropriate celebration, is it? This constant need for alcohol to play a part in team building is detrimental to the moral fibre of the force and bad for our image with the public.’
    Fenwick couldn’t believe what he was hearing and had started to explain to his boss why he was so wrong. Big mistake.
    ‘Sir!’
    One of the technicians was standing, waving something at him. Fenwick ran back up the hill, ignoring the twinge in his knee and pleased that he wasn’t breathless at the top. His jogging routine must be paying off; perhaps it was worth the tedium.
    ‘What have you got?’
    ‘A key. It was in the spoil from the grave and there’s some sort of identity tag with it.’
    Fenwick peered but of course the scrap of metal meant nothing. It would take days of work to try and identify what the key was made of and from that to produce a list of manufacturers. But the discovery pleased him; it vindicated his insistence on a fingertip search of the ground in and around the grave.
    ‘Excellent,’ he said, and his spirits lifted.
    He had respectful confidence in the Sussex Forensic Laboratory and real hope that the key would turn out to be significant. The advances in the science of crime fascinated him; they complemented his fundamental approach to detection: the belief that detailed, rigorous investigation would yield success in time. But he had to admit that most other aspects of modern policing bored him. The obsession with the latest management theories; the politics local and national; the need to be a statistician just to cope with the never-ending hunger for analysis: did they result in one more conviction? Answers on the back of a postcard, he thought. No, make that a postage stamp.
    His problem was that for the past thirteen years he’d ignored the need to identify what it now took to work the way up the ladder, relying on his compulsion to solve crimes to see him through. Beyond that, he’d barely given his career a thought. His marriage, the arrival of two children in quick succession, his wife’s illness and then her slow decline had meant that there’d been no place left for ambition. When Monique had eventually died the year before, it was a blessed release for her and essential for the children, allowing them to grieve properly and move on. But turning off the life support machine had been the hardest thing he had ever had to force himself to do and the personal impact had been more devastating than he would have believed possible.
    At first he’d simply been exhausted. Then the hunt for a serial killer – a particularly complicated and deadly case – had consumed him. But once he had the murderer in custody, the grief he had unknowingly been holding at bay engulfed him, though no one, not even