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Things have been cleaned up. Some very good chief constables have had much to do with that.’ He smiled again; he was long past his blushing days, but offering compliments didn’t come easily to him. ‘But individual corruption still exists. Coppers under pressure still try to fabricate evidence, or at least shape what evidence exists to their own ends. And the press connive at what is now the easiest and most widespread of corruptions for a modern copper. Too many men and women are passing on information for money to the press and other media. The temptations are there all the time, because the rewards are good and the prospects of being detected seem smaller than they used to be.’
    â€˜I agree with you on that. I want my senior staff to pass on the message that there will be zero tolerance of anyone releasing information for payment.’
    â€˜I’ll certainly do that in the CID section, sir. Every copper who’s corrupt is damaging the rest of us. That’s one of the reasons why police officers are afraid to admit their occupation when they’re socializing nowadays. That’s much more pronounced than it was in my youth.’
    â€˜I take note of what you say and endorse it. Zero tolerance: tell anyone who will listen. No, tell even those who don’t want to listen!’
    Armstrong had the good sense to close their meeting when they were agreed on something they both felt strongly about. The old bugger had been neither as prickly nor as out of date as he’d feared. He watched the cups and biscuits being cleared away and prepared for his next meeting with a feeling of satisfaction which he hadn’t anticipated.
    It had been good to talk to a senior man who was driven by a passionate aversion to crime and all its manifestations.
    Sixty miles away from the Chief Constable and the most famous member of his staff, a woman of thirty-five was struggling with quite different problems.
    Elfrida was a stupid name. She’d always thought that, even when she’d been a child and little semi-circles of adults had assured her that it wasn’t. ‘You’re so lucky to have a name that’s different!’ they’d cooed at her. But when you were a child, you didn’t want to be different. You wanted to be just like the rest. That way, they’d accept you and you wouldn’t be noticed. You could watch the rest and think whatever you liked about them, so long as you weren’t being noticed.
    She’d tried making the best of it during her first year at university, when it had seemed fashionable to be different. She’d tried to spread the myth that Elfrida was unusual and thus interesting, that it gave her a start on others when it came to being noticed. But her heart had never been in that. She hadn’t been sure how much she wanted to be noticed, even in the ever-changing cavalcade of student life. Then, towards the end of that first year, she’d heard three of her contemporaries mocking both her pretensions and her name, whilst she was closeted in the washroom. She’d promptly abandoned forever the pretence of liking her name.
    She’d tried ‘Fred’ for a while. It had worked fine with the people who knew her. They’d accepted it and used it, after a week or two. But it led to tiresome explanations every time you met new people, and you couldn’t use it on job applications when you came to the end of your degree and your teacher training. And some of the men apparently thought she was a lesbian, because she called herself Fred. She couldn’t have that, so Fred had to go.
    She was sitting in the staff room at the comprehensive school, worrying about her name when she should have been marking books. She’d come here for one term as a supply teacher, but they’d made her permanent, when the woman who had been on maternity leave had finally confirmed that she didn’t wish to return. The new mum had said all