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investigation. He stopped smiling with the knowledge that the culprit must be one of his own team. For all their front and initiative, they’d be sacrificing their own job if they didn’t watch out.
    There wasn’t one he wanted to lose, but Marks thought about each of his detectives in turn, silently listing them from the longest-serving to the latest to finish his probation. Only the final name stood out.
    DC Gary Goodhew: the departmental enigma. The twenty-five-year-old who had reached detective faster than anyone else Marks knew.
    Goodhew had been at Parkside for six months. Marks had informed the team that their new colleague was a high-flying, privately educated graduate with a First in Maths. He had immediately realized that what he’d intended as a build-up sounded more like a warning, and Goodhew was thus met with a very chilly reception.
    It had only lasted until about lunchtime on day one. By the afternoon, DC Charles had offered him a place on the pool team and PC Kelly Wilkes was referring to Goodhew’s slightly unkempt appearance as that ‘just out of bed’ look.
    The word ‘fit’ had been bandied round the canteen a fair bit too. In many ways, Goodhew came across as just an average bloke: his features a little too sharp, his hair a nondescript brown and he was slim-built with no discernible accent. But somehow the composite wasn’t average at all. Maybe it was his personality that did it: laid-back but serious, intuitive, but seemingly unaware of his own appeal. Private enough to be intriguing.
    Just as well that Goodhew had remained apparently unaware of the frisson that crackled through the corridors within a couple of days of his arrival. Marks thought it more likely that the young detective was under the delusion that the female staff were consistently that helpful, but there were also days when Marks suspected that he got better results when he asked Goodhew to ask someone to do something than even when he asked them himself.
    By contrast, DC Kincaide was the peacock of the department, mentally and physically smart, but surrounded by an air of fraught ambition and a whiff of insecurity. He still wasn’t too warm towards the new arrival. Marks liked the idea of pairing them up sometime soon, figuring that it would give them both an opportunity to develop.
    He turned the evidence bag over, and the toothbrush left a wet streak on the inside of the plastic. Kincaide, at least, wasn’t in the market for sending anonymous tip-offs; he liked his efforts publicly rewarded at every point.
    Goodhew was considerably less simple to assess. From Marks’ point of view, the contradictions he noticed were what defined Goodhew and, more frustratingly, left him feeling that he had grasped only a superficial understanding of him. He knew DC Kincaide had diverted his initial opinion from: ‘He’s got a degree in Maths, so he must be a geek’, to ‘Women like him, he must be gay.’ DI Marks wasn’t at all sure how to categorize his new DC, but he was confident that he wouldn’t be able to do it in a single word.

SEVEN

    DC Gary Goodhew had been off duty for forty-five minutes, spending at least half of them walking away from the centre of town. He was slightly later than planned, but he still allowed himself time to stop halfway across the railway bridge. There was a chill in the air, but he didn’t hurry. He rested his elbows on the painted steel and watched Cambridge station for several minutes. He wasn’t looking for anything in particular, more like everything in general. A single-engined plane curved through the sky, turning away as it left the airport in its wake.
    Somewhere below it, he knew there would be an arrest shortly. Marks would have the envelope by now, and soon the streets recently scarred by the Airport Rapist could begin to heal. Goodhew drew in a therapeutic lungful of air; his head had cleared and everything smelt fresher now. He started to walk again. He reached the traffic lights