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It’s much better that I seem like a friend on a social visit, if I’m to discover anything. That way, people won’t be immediately on their guard against me.’
    A game of golf whilst on paid police duty: things were looking up.
    He was a big man and very black. Most people found him intimidating, at first. But George Martindale was warm and friendly; his broad smile and large, very white teeth helped people to feel at ease with him.
    He was a very physical man. He worked long and hard with the council road team, and he never shirked his share of physical work, even when the foreman wasn’t present. He was popular with the mixed gang of people who worked with him, because he was always willing to do more than his share, always cheerful, and always willing to accept his ration of the sometimes dubious banter which passed as humour during the rough and tumble of the working day.
    George took racism in his stride. He never seemed to get upset when clumsy taunts were offered to him as wit. He was from Jamaica, he said. He never revealed whether he had been born there or whether he was a first-generation immigrant of Jamaican parents. No one was quite sure about his age and he never volunteered it. Early thirties, most people thought, but it was difficult to be certain, because he had an unlined face and clear dark eyes and not a grey hair among the crinkly black ones which grew so plentifully upon his large head.
    There was an incident on this warm May day which showed that George Martindale should not be treated lightly. His formidable physique in itself made people cautious, but he was so affable that sometimes they didn’t even consider that he might turn aggressive. Afterwards, it seemed to most of his fellow workers characteristic of George that he should react violently not on his own behalf but on someone else’s.
    The latest recruit to the gang was a stringy youth who was barely seventeen and who looked two years younger. Damien Field was willing but not over-bright; his temperament, combined with his physical limitations, led to a series of gibes from his insensitive seniors. When your thin arms worked with spades and picks, when you struggled hard to control the vigorous movements of a pneumatic drill, you were an easy target for men seeking to lighten their day with cheap humour.
    They were repairing the pavement and road outside the main entrance to a now derelict building. The repeated passage of heavy lorries had caused serious potholes as well as broken flags over the years. It was heavy work and young Damien endured a series of gibes about his physical weakness. They became cruder and more sexual as the day went on. The fact that Field reacted only with a weak smile and an unconvincing pretence of finding the comments amusing only incited greater insults. According to his harassers, he was now not only incapable of getting a girl but incapable of ‘giving her one’ if he did. Damien didn’t feel strong enough or well-established enough to tell his insulters to get lost.
    In this context, that only made them bolder. They would go on baiting him and get ever more obscene until they wrung some sort of violent dismissal from him. Damien vaguely realized this, but he felt that if he turned aggressive they would bludgeon him and drive him out of this job he so badly needed. His dad was out of work and his mother was an invalid, but he couldn’t tell them that. It would only show further weakness.
    It was when Field almost lost control of the pneumatic drill, saw it sliding out of his grasp towards the horizontal, and had to switch it off that the day’s incident occurred. The worst of his tormentors, a squat man with grimy tattoos upon his brawny forearms, was delighted to see Damien defeated. ‘Too strong for a raving pooftah like you, those machines! Young lad with a delicate skin like yours could do much better as a rent boy in Brum. I could put you in touch with a