Flawed Read Free

feelings, his feelings, or how doing the right things for the wrong reasons is worse than doing the wrong things for the right reasons. In short, Alix Hyde might be a woman by accident of birth but she was a police officer by definition and that made her someone he could work with.
    When the front desk phoned to say she'd arrived he went downstairs to meet her. He didn't have massive expectations. TV drama was, in his experience, unrealistic about how much glamour can be fielded with the time and energy left to a police officer of either sex at the end of the working day. Inpractice, male detectives tend to look as if they've slept in their clothes – often because they have – and their female colleagues as if their priorities are comfortable shoes and washable trousers.
    For all Deacon knew, Detective Inspector Hyde's shoes were supremely comfortable and her trousers could be boiled if the need arose. It didn't matter: no one would be looking at her feet.
    She came forward like a man, handshake first. ‘Alix Hyde. Good to meet you, Detective Superintendent Deacon.’ There was something mannish about her voice too, pitched half an octave below where you expected. It was probably no more than a reflection of her body type, as tall as Brodie and more sturdily built – but it was unusual, unsettling even, and…what was that word?…Deacon knew it as well as he knew his own name…hell, lots of people thought it
was
his name… Ah yes. Sexy.
    He took her hand and by now was unsurprised by the strength of her grip. It went with the height, the voice and the short, ruthlessly styled hair, somewhere between brown and blonde and flecked with grey. She might have been forty, and she didn't dye the grey hairs because she didn't care who knew. Deacon found that reassuring in a woman. It spoke of the triumph of confidence over anxiety, of someone not so much growing older as growing up.
    He realised he was still holding her hand and dropped it abruptly. God knows what kind of a rube she took him for. He'd heard of a thing called a practised smile and tried for that; but he hadn't had enough practice so it came over as a leer. ‘Anything for SOCA, Inspector.’
    All the way up the stairs, and there were four flights, he was fighting the urge to make the obvious comment. She must have heard it so often. She must be ready to deck anyone who thought it was original and clever and too good to keep to himself. And he almost made it. But the silence stretched, and you have to say something, and Deacon was never any good at small talk. As he opened his door for her he did the crocodile smile again and said, ‘And are you, Inspector? Serious and organised?’
    Somehow she refrained from kicking his shin. But he heard the disappointed sigh. ‘Not particularly,’ she said. ‘And hardly at all.’
    ‘Me neither,’ admitted Deacon, though she might have guessed from the state of his in-tray. Not because it was over-flowing: it wasn't. The papers in it were surprisingly tidy, either sorted into files or held together with bulldog clips. What was significant about Deacon's in-tray was not its contents but that it balanced precariously on top of four or five others in a stack half a metre high, like ancient cities built each on the ruins of the last. Tel Deacon. Detective Sergeant Voss, who kept the habitation level in order, declined responsibility for excavating the foundations, some of which had been here longer than he had. He said it was a Health & Safety issue and would require pit-props.
    Deacon moved another pile of papers onto the floor to enable his visitor to sit. Though it wasn't a huge office it would have been big enough for anyone else. But Jack Deacon took up a lot of space, physically – he was both tall and heavy – and also psychologically. When he walked into a room he filled it. He had the same kind of presence as a bull or a bear– indeed, colleagues referred to him, with varying degrees of affection, as The