Hour Of Darkness Read Online Free Page A

restaurant.
    Sarah’s eyes followed him. ‘Nice kid,’ she murmured.
    I sensed an unspoken ‘But’.
    ‘But …?’
    She frowned, then shook her head. ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘One of those “walk on my grave” moments, but it’s gone. I had a strange feeling that I’d seen him before, that’s all. But it’s nonsense, for I’ve never been to Cordoba in my life.’

Three
    ‘Was it a quiet weekend, Sauce?’ Sammy Pye asked his recently appointed detective sergeant, across the desk in his small office.
    ‘Yes thanks, boss. Yours?’
    ‘Yes, quiet and pleasant. A nice counter to the way we ended last week, with that awful post-mortem.’
    ‘Mine too. I was a bear on Friday evening. Cheeky was great, though. She saw straight away that I was struggling, and put me right. As far as she could, that is. I was still a wee bit on edge, in case we got a call-out.’
    ‘Mmm,’ the DI murmured. ‘But we didn’t, neither of us, and in a way that isn’t good news. It means that the scientific bods haven’t come up with a DNA match for our victim, and that the trawl that we put in place across the force area on Friday for a missing white female, probably in her sixties, with an appendectomy scar and a history of childbirth hasn’t come up with a single possibility.’
    ‘So we’ve got a murder in our hands, but with no way of identifying the victim.’
    ‘That’s the story, Sauce. Plus we’ve got a new boss in the city CID who’s only going to be interested in keeping his clear-up rate at one hundred per cent.’
    Haddock frowned. ‘Am I the only one that thinks his appointment was a bit of a surprise?’
    ‘Hell no,’ Pye retorted, ‘you’d be a minority of one if you didn’t. “Come back, Neil McIlhenney, all is forgiven,” that’s the general view . . . not that the big fella did anything to forgive, before he headed south.
    ‘I know what was behind it, though; my dear wife might not be a Command Corridor secretary any more, but she still has her sources. There are a couple of reasons. First, neither Chief Constable Steele nor ACC McGuire wanted a superintendent as their exec. The truth is, Bob Skinner only put the guy there as part of his rehabilitation after his breakdown. But on top of that, they say that ACC McGuire does not like Superintendent Mackenzie, and vice versa.’
    ‘Uh?’ the DS grunted. ‘Then why . . .’
    Pye laughed. ‘Why did he give him a key CID job? So that he can prove himself one way or another.
    ‘David Mackenzie might have been in a uniform for the last couple of years, clicking his heels and saying “Yes, sir. No, sir” to the high heid yins, but the arrogant bastard that ran our drugs squad and brought the nickname “Bandit” with him when he moved from Strathclyde, that guy never went away. He’s always lurked there under the surface. If you ask me, what Maggie Steele and Mario McGuire have done is let him out again.’
    ‘To piss all of us off?’
    ‘Hardly. They’ll be judged in part by his success or failure. Also, remember this; the fact is that until he crashed and burned, Mackenzie was a good detective; an arsehole, certainly, but a good detective. Bob Skinner would never have brought him through from Strathclyde otherwise, and I cannot believe that the bosses would have put him where he is now out of malice.’
    ‘Why doesn’t the ACC like him?’
    ‘I think it’s because Mackenzie misread him. When he came here he thought he would leapfrog him on his way up the ladder, so he didn’t take him seriously enough, didn’t treat him with the respect he was due. That was a huge mistake. ACC McGuire might be an amiable bloke, but he’s very sharp, and he’s a fucking monster if you get on the wrong side of him.’
    ‘So why’s he put him in the city coordinator job?’
    ‘That’s complicated,’ Pye said. ‘It’s only a guess on my part, but I think it goes back to the time when he was head of CID and Neil McIlhenney, before he moved