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Hastings. Who knows? It’s all politics, anyhow. All that stuff coming to light about the Miners’ Strike. The IPCC.’
    ‘Maybe what they want’s a clean pair of hands.’
    ‘And if it all goes tits up, I’m the one takes the blame.’
    Resnick grinned. ‘Tits up – Kenyan expression, is it?’
    ‘Fuck off, Charlie.’
    He laughed and drank the last of his coffee. There were trams criss-crossing at the foot of Beastmarket Hill. From just beyond the square, on Angel Row, he could hear the usual saxophone player doodling over a soundtrack of ‘Winter Wonderland’.
    Busk early for Christmas.
    ‘Let’s walk,’ he said.
    They made a strange couple for anyone with time to notice. Resnick tall, though with the beginnings of a stoop that threatened to take an inch from his height; bulky still inside that grubby raincoat, a man, one might think, who liked his food, a glass or two of ale. Who spent too much time behind a desk, sitting in a chair. Fifteen, twenty years before, he would have looked much the same.
    Catherine Njoroge was tall also, not so far off Resnick’s height, and she walked with a certain stateliness, accentuated by her long neck, the way she held her head. She wore a black trouser suit, trousers with a slight flare, boots with a low heel; her hair tied back with purple ribbon; a silver ring on her right hand aside, no accessories, no ornamentation; almond eyes.
    ‘Who else,’ Resnick asked, ‘have you got on board?’
    ‘Just you so far. Assuming you say yes.’
    ‘God help us then.’
    ‘Charlie, come on. Don’t start doing yourself down.’
    ‘You think they’ll wear it? Picard and Hastings. Me tagging along.’
    ‘I don’t see why not. As far as they’re concerned, you’re going to be doing the same as you do here. Interviewing witnesses, taking statements. Just travelling a bit further to work, that’s all.’
    ‘And as far as you’re concerned?’
    They stopped short of the pavement edge.
    ‘You were there, Charlie, weren’t you, during the strike?’
    ‘Running an intelligence gathering team, yes. Out of Mansfield. Half a dozen officers in the field, undercover, mix and mingle – letting on they were local, journalists maybe – not that that made them all that welcome. All the while keeping their eyes open, eyes and ears. Cameras, sometimes, those little video recorders. Anything useful – a new face giving instructions, passing on orders, plans for a new picket – we’d pass it along to headquarters. From there, on down to London. Special Branch, the NRC.’
    She looked at him questioningly, not recognising the acronym.
    ‘National Reporting Centre, Room 1309, New Scotland Yard.’
    ‘You were running spies, then, Charlie. Espionage.’
    ‘I was doing what I could to stop this part of the country breaking apart. Civil bloody war. At least, that’s what I thought.’
    ‘And now?’
    He didn’t answer. They turned left along Cheapside, a trajectory that would take them back past the Victoria Centre and so to the Central Police Station.
    ‘There was a lot of what we did that wasn’t right,’ Resnick said eventually. ‘A lot we should’ve done differently or not done at all. And a great deal of what happened locally, well, that was taken out of our hands. Not much of an excuse, maybe, but there it is. But I met some good people, no mistaking that. Either side of the picket line. Helped bury one of them not so long back.’
    ‘You feel all right about going back up there, though? After all this time?’
    ‘Find out, won’t we? Soon as you get the go-ahead.’

7
    CAT AND MOUSE, that’s what it was, except a sight more serious. Striking miners from Yorkshire, the more militant areas like Barnsley and Doncaster in particular, targeting the more northern of the Notts pits at first – Harworth, Welbeck, Bledwell Vale – and then, when they’d succeeded, temporarily at least, in persuading large numbers not to cross the picket line, moving their attentions