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across, gave an uneven striped effect from years of bunched bleaching by the sun. Furniture was minimal and functional – chairs with scuffed light wood arms and prolapsed seats in green mock leather, a table whose Formica top was scarred and pitted with old cigarette burns. Though the kitchen was rarely used for cooking, just as a depository for the foil and polystyrene boxes of takeaways, it still contrived to be extremely grimy. When he walked in there the Inspector’s soles made a slight sucking sound against the sticky linoleum.
    And the atmosphere of the flat was heavy with the smell of long-dead cigarettes.
    Still, Craig Wilkinson had years before ceased to be aware of his surroundings, and it was a long time since anyone else had been there to notice them. Nowadays he had the same attitude to sex as he did to promotion. Since all attempts were doomed to failure, it was hardly worth filling in the metaphorical application forms. What was the point of going through the elaborate – and expensive – rigmarole of chatting up, buying drinks for, buying meals for, and luring back home, someone with whom it was never going to work out from the start? Wilkinson found that, as he progressed through his fifties, his libido had shrunk till it was like some residual nub of an organ left behind by the evolutionary process, a vermiform appendix whose function wasn’t quite clear. The Inspector did sometimes still have romantic thoughts, but he very rarely had erotic ones.
    The predominant thoughts he had when he was in the flat tended to be gloomy ones, which was why he spent the minimum amount of time possible there. Sitting alone, puffing on another cigarette, he would become obsessed by old fiascos and frustrations, by the failures in both his private and professional lives. Because, in spite of what he had hinted at to Sergeant Hughes, Inspector Wilkinson had never really ‘made his mark’ in the Police Force. Nor, it has to be said, had he ‘made his mark’ significantly at an emotional level. The attitude of his former wife to him was one of undiluted contempt and, so far as he could tell, none of his other women remembered him as anything other than a mildly distasteful detour from the main ongoing journey of their lives.
    But, in spite of all this, Craig Wilkinson was not a pessimist. Gloomy and grumpy he might be, but it never occurred to him for a moment that his aspirations were at an end, that he was destined never to ‘make his mark’. Oh no, in his heart of hearts, he knew it would still happen. He’d left it late perhaps, but he, Detective Inspector Craig Wilkinson, was still going to be remembered as a remarkable detective.
    He had long since recognized that his basic problem was one of identity. The worlds of television cop shows, which he watched avidly, and crime fiction, which he read avidly, were full of truly individual policemen, quirky, gifted, eccentric, bolshie, hard-drinking, unlikely, but, above all, memorable. There were even one or two such men and women – though obviously many less – in the world of the real Police Force. And Inspector Wilkinson longed passionately to join their number.
    The trouble was that police work remained an incredibly painstaking and repetitive business. It was, not to put too fine a point on it, as boring as hell. And this quality was one which the Inspector’s character, in spite of any wishes he might have for himself, reflected all too accurately.
    At times he’d tried to make himself more interesting by grafting characteristics on to his personality. There had been experiments with alcohol. Booze, after all, was the natural accompaniment to the long lonely sessions of self-recrimination in his flat. He should be one of those cops who was never without a bottle at the bedside, a hip flask in the raincoat pocket. Every morning he should wake up with a brain-crushing hangover, but still somehow manage the