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raid. No way to ask DI Carlisle about it now: he’d died of a heart attack five or six years back. Depressing, how many of her former colleagues who’d managed to actually make it out of the job alive were now dropping like flies as time caught up.
    But Leo was still around, even if he was retired. Pierce checked her watch and stood. “Right,” she said. “I’m going to see if I can talk to Leo Grey. Maybe he remembers some details about that raid that didn’t make the reports.”
    And even if he didn’t, she still owed him a visit that she’d been putting off for far too long.
     
     
    L EO WAS MORE than willing to meet with her immediately—in fact, his eagerness at the prospect of being involved in police work made her feel guilty that her pretext for seeing him was such a long shot. Enforced retirement had to chafe for a man only in his forties who’d kept himself in good shape before he’d been injured. Pierce hadn’t seen him since the hospital, but with the state that he’d been in back then, she doubted he could be back up to full strength barely four months later.
    The address that he directed her to was a modest terraced house in a village on the edge of the Dales. After much circling of the narrow streets in search of somewhere to legally park, she made her way back on foot and pressed the bell.
    The door was opened by a small woman in blue jeans and a knitted cardigan: Leo’s wife, whose name unfortunately currently escaped her. Ruth? Rose? Something like that. Pierce had only met her briefly at the hospital, though she’d made a good impression, a calm, pragmatic woman who seemed well-suited to her equally phlegmatic husband.
    “DCI Pierce,” she said, with a warm smile. “Leo said you were on your way. You’re looking well.”
    That was questionable after the day she’d had, but she supposed that when Rose—she was nearly positive it was Rose—had seen her last she’d been newly released from her shoulder surgery and still half-stoned on painkillers.
    “Sorry to butt in on you at such short notice,” she said. Often a bit of a social wobble adjusting to the half-forgotten fact that other people had families and lives outside of police work. “I shouldn’t take up too much of his time.”
    “Oh, do,” maybe-Rose said cheerfully, stepping back to let her in and gesturing her down the narrow hallway. “He’ll be delighted to have something to do. He’s never been much of a one for being cooped up around the house. Leave him alone for five minutes and he’s putting up shelves and talking about re-tiling the bathroom, and never mind that he’s still supposed to be resting that leg.”
    On their last case together Leo had taken a brutal battering from a shapeshifter in a chimaera pelt, an unholy hybrid patchwork of animal skins. He’d come away with an ugly laundry list of injuries: broken ribs, a shattered kneecap, claw wounds through the muscle of his thigh, and probably worst of all to a man accustomed to being steady-fingered on the trigger, a nasty crushing injury to his right arm and hand that had left him with nerve damage.
    Pierce was guiltily aware that she hadn’t been keeping up with his recovery as well as she should. He was a taciturn man at the best of times, and a few brief phone calls hadn’t told her much about his medical condition: the fact that his status had gone from medical leave to early retirement said more than anything he’d shared directly.
    Maybe-Rose led her through to the front room, a warmly cosy sort of space with dark wooden furniture, alcoves full of books and CDs, and a brown leather suite. Leo himself was sitting in one of the armchairs, and she couldn’t help but think that he looked older and more worn than she remembered. He’d always had an ageless sort of quality, craggy features and sandy blond hair that hid the signs of grey, but where he’d always been lean he now just looked stretched thin, the angles of his face etched more