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does what she’s asked, and enjoys catching villains. She’s good at it too, even if she is currently feeling less than happy in her work. As one of four detective constables on the Serious and Organised Crime Unit, she has little say in which of her senior colleagues she is paired with, but she enjoys her working days considerably more when helping McAvoy or Pharaoh. At the moment, she is working for Detective Inspector Shaz Archer, and loathing every moment of it. Archer and DCI Colin Ray are effectively leading the unit’s investigation into the spike in organised crime. Pharaoh is overseeing, but her day is so filled with paperwork and budget meetings that Ray and Archer are running the show, revelling in being top dogs.
    This morning, Ray had told Tremberg to accompany Archer to HMP Hull because there was a good chance that the man they were seeing would warm to two women more than he would to Ray himself. Tremberg had seen the logic in that. It is impossible to warm to Colin Ray. He’s a walking sneer, all yellow teeth and nicotine-stained fingers; all curses and spittle and ratty little eyes.
    Tremberg had accepted Ray’s orders with good grace, even though she had despaired at the thought of spending the morning with the snotty detective inspector who seems to be the only female that Colin Ray has any time for. The two are pretty much inseparable, though they make for unlikely friends. Archer is part of the horsey crowd and spends her free time playing polo and knocking back Pimm’s with people called Savannah andSheridan. Ray coaches football in his spare time and spends his money on greyhounds, lager and ex-wives.
    Tremberg is not the sort to be jealous of her female colleagues and does not object to the fact that Shaz Archer is extraordinarily attractive. It’s her personality she bridles at. She puts Tremberg in a mind of a California high school bully in a film for teens. She holds everybody and everything in open contempt, and uses her looks to manipulate colleagues and crooks alike. Her arrest record is impressive, but Tremberg finds the way she flaunts herself distasteful. While she admires Trish Pharaoh for just being herself – for being sexy and mumsy and hard as fucking nails – with Archer it’s all strategic. Every time she purses her lips or blows on her perfect fingernails, she’s doing it to get a reaction out of somebody. She keeps miniskirts and crop-tops in her desk so she can get changed into something exotic if she’s interviewing some easily led pervert, and there are rumours she has traded her affections for confessions in the past. Tremberg knows police stations to be termite mounds of malicious gossip and had originally decided to ignore such slander about a female colleague. Then she got to know Archer herself, and decided the woman was, if nothing else, a bitch of the first order.
    Still, she didn’t look quite so well groomed this morning …
    As Tremberg passes the cake shop, she has to bite down on her smile again. The morning’s interview at Hull Prison had been fruitless in terms of information, but Tremberg wouldn’t call the day a waste of time. It’s hard to think of any morning as a write-off when it involves watching a drug dealer chuck a polystyrene cup full of piss over your boss.
    ‘How did he even do it?’ Archer had spat, furious, as the guards led the laughing Jackson away, and her waterproofmascara began to prove it wasn’t piss-proof by running down her cheeks.
    Tremberg had had no answer. She had thought Jackson was just ignoring them. Instead he was busily urinating beneath the desk, waiting for the right moment in proceedings to demonstrate his strength of feeling about their questions. It had worked, too. The interview was terminated without him even confirming his name, let alone who had paid him to be at the wheel of the marijuana-filled Transit van that had been pulled over by traffic officers eight weeks before. Tremberg had been planning to