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himself for tomorrow. Tugging out the bottle, he drank some more water. His mouth was dry, parched. Leaden butterflies flip-flopped in his belly.
    Friends had pushed him into a handful of blind dates over the past few years, and each time he’d been a bag of nerves before he’d shown up. The nerves were even worse tonight, and, not having had a chance to shower and change, he felt uncomfortable about his appearance. All his detailed planning about what he was going to wear had gone out of the window, thanks to the two punks.
    One of them had fired a sawn-off shotgun at an off-duty cop who had come too close to the jewellery shop – but luckily not quite close enough. Roy had seen, more times than he had needed, the effects of a 12-bore fired from a few feet at a human being. It could shear off a limb or punch a hole the size of a football through their chest. This cop, a detective called Bill Green who Grace knew – they had played rugger on the same team a few times – had been peppered from about thirty yards. At this distance the pellets could just about have brought down a pheasant or a rabbit, but not a fifteen-stone scrum prop in a leather jacket. Bill Green was relatively lucky – his jacket had shielded his body but he had several pellets embedded in his face, including one in his left eye.
    By the time Grace had got to the scene, the punks were already in custody, after crashing and rolling their getaway Jeep. He was determined to stick them with an attempted murder charge on top of armed robbery. He hated the way more and more criminals were using guns in the UK – and forcing more and more police to have firearms to hand. In his father’s day armed cops would have been unheard of. Now in some cities forces kept guns in the boots of their cars as routine. Grace wasn’t naturally a vengeful person, but so far as he was concerned, anyone who fired a gun at a police officer – or at any innocent person – should be hanged.
    The traffic still wasn’t moving. He looked at the dash clock, at the rain falling, at the clock again, at the burning red tail lights of the car in front – the prat had his fogs on, almost dazzling him. Then he checked his watch, hoping the car clock might be wrong. But it wasn’t. Ten whole minutes had passed and they hadn’t moved an inch. Nor had any traffic come past from the opposite direction.
    Shards of blue light flitted across his interior mirror and wing mirror. Then he heard a siren. A patrol car screamed past. Then an ambulance. Another patrol car, flat out, followed by two fire engines.
    Shit. There had been road works when he’d come this way a couple of days ago, and he’d figured that was the reason for the delay. But now he realized it must be an accident, and fire engines meant it was a bad one.
    Another fire engine went past. Then another ambulance, twos-and-blues full on. Followed by a rescue truck.
    He looked at the clock again: 9.15 p.m. He should have picked her up three-quarters of an hour ago, in Tunbridge Wells, which was still a good twenty minutes away without this hold-up.
    Terry Miller, a newly divorced Detective Inspector in Grace’s division, had been regaling him with boasts about his conquests from a couple of internet dating sites and urging Grace to sign up. Roy had resisted, then, when he started finding suggestive emails in his inbox from different women, found out to his fury that Terry Miller had signed him up to a site called U-Date without telling him.
    He still had no idea what had prompted him to actually respond to one of the emails. Loneliness? Curiosity? Lust? He wasn’t sure. For the past eight years he had got through life just by going steadily from day to day. Some days he tried to forget, other days he felt guilty for not remembering.
    Sandy.
    Now he was suddenly feeling guilty for going on this date.
    She looked gorgeous – from her photo, at any rate. He liked her name, too. Claudine. French-sounding, it had something exotic.