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support.’
    ‘You have it,’ replied Deacon, a shade shortly. She hadn't exactly asked if he meant to shield Walsh, but clearly that had been her worry. Deacon wasn't new to this job, and he hadn't been a starry-eyed idealist when he was. He knew that police officers were flawed individuals like everyone else and that things like that happened. And he didn't know Alix Hyde and she didn't know him: she was entitled to wonder if he could be trusted. It still felt like an insult.
    ‘I wasn't expecting anything different,’ she said. ‘Before I talked to you I talked to people about you. At Division, and other places. A lot of them thought I was crazy targeting Walsh, but none of them thought I'd have a problem with you.’ And then, just as he started to blossom in the warmth of the compliment, she added in an undertone: ‘At least, not in that way.’
    Deacon blinked. ‘What way, then?’
    Alix Hyde laughed out loud. ‘Superintendent, you don't need me to tell you what kind of a reputation you've got at Division. I assumed you'd spent the last ten years cultivating it.’
    The slow, bashful grin made him look like a schoolboy caught out in a bit of surreptitious intelligence. ‘I can't imagine what you mean,’ he lied.
    She didn't elaborate. There really was no need. Both of them knew that Detective Superintendent Deacon's superiors had him down as a hard, difficult, occasionally unpredictable, wholly ungracious man who – regrettably enough – was very good at his job. And both of them knew that Deacon would be content with that on his tombstone.
    Hyde sat back in her chair. ‘Fine. Well, there's one more thing to settle, and I've one more favour to ask you. How closely do you want me to keep you informed as the inquiry proceeds? And, can you spare someone to help me?’
    Mercurial was not a word commonly associated with Jack Deacon. He was a big, heavy man now well embarked on middle-age, and he tended both to move and to think ponderously. Except in absolute need, when he could still move like the county-class rugby player he once was and think with both speed and precision. By the time she'd finished the questions he knew the answers, and the same answer served for both. ‘I've got just the man for you. Charlie Voss, my sergeant. He's smart and he's sharp, he knows this town inside out, and he's as straight as a die.’
    What he thought and didn't add was, And he'll keep me as closely informed as if it was me doing your legwork.

CHAPTER THREE
    Daniel walked home through the park. A scant three days before the winter solstice – and coincidentally, or possibly not, his birthday – the light had gone from the afternoon by three o'clock and by four it was dusk. Street lamps glimmered like a string of beads along the Promenade, and on the shore the three black fingers of the netting-sheds were silhouetted against an English Channel bright with moontrack. The one nearest the old pier was his home.
    From the outside, all that distinguished it from its sisters were the gallery he'd built at upper-storey level and sometimes a couple of milk-bottles waiting politely at the foot of the iron steps. But inside he'd got as much space and comfort as a single man needs, and when he took his telescope out onto the gallery the night sky was a perfect dome above him.
    But though it was almost dark enough for astronomy he had something to do first. He walked on another hundred yards, then turned left up Fisher Hill and left again into Shack Lane.
    When he first came here from Nottingham three years ago, Shack Lane was about as salubrious as the name. There were boarded-up windows and lock-up garages, and an Anglo-Chinese takeaway whose
tour-de-force
was sweet-and-sourchips. But about the same time he was moving into the netting-shed – and it was still a netting-shed then, complete with ancient lobster-pots in the boathouse underneath – still unknown to him, Brodie Farrell was setting up her new business round the