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doubts started. What if she wasn’t up to it?
    What if she froze or corpsed in front of such a big audience? That would be the end, completely the end!
    She would be OK; she would somehow get through. After all she came from a theatrical family. It was in her blood; her mother’s parents had been music hall artistes before they’d retired and bought a bed and breakfast business near the sea in Brighton.
    As she crested the brow and saw the next hill unfurling for a mile ahead of her, and wide open farmland to either side broken by just a few solitary trees and mesh fences, she could see no sign of Nero. A strong breeze was blowing, bending the rape and the long green wheat sheaves. She cupped her hands over her mouth and shouted, ‘NERO! Come on, boy. NERO!’
    After a few moments she saw a wide ripple in the rape, something zigzagging through it – Nero seemed incapable of ever running in a straight line. Then he broke cover, and came bounding towards her, holding something white and dangly in his mouth.
    A rabbit, she thought at first, and hoped at least the poor thing was dead. She couldn’t bear it when he brought a live, wounded one and plopped it proudly at her feet, wriggling and screeching in fright, which he was fond of doing.
    ‘Come on, boy, what’s that you’ve got there? Drop! Drop!’
    Then her own mouth dropped.
    A shiver rippled all the way through her as she took one nervous step forward, staring down at the motionless white object.
    Then she began to scream.
    6
    Roy Grace did not enjoy holding press conferences. But he was well aware the police were paid public servants, and therefore the public had a right to be kept informed. It was the spin that journalists put on everything that he hated. It seemed to him that journalists weren’t interested in informing the public; that their job was to sell newspapers or attract viewers or listeners. They wanted to take news and slant it into stories, the more sensational the better.
    And if there wasn’t anything sensational in the story, then why not have a pop at the police themselves? Few things grabbed the public’s attention better than a whiff of police negligence, racism or heavy-handedness. Car chases going wrong had been a particular hobby horse in recent years, especially if members of the public were injured or killed by reckless police driving.
    Like yesterday, when two suspects being chased in a stolen car had crashed off a bridge and drowned in a river.
    Which was why he was here now, standing in the Briefing Room, facing a open-centred rectangular table with not enough chairs for all the press present, his back to a large, smart, curved board bearing an artistic display of five police badges on a blue background, with the www.crimestoppers.co.uk number printed prominently beneath each of them.
    He guessed there were about forty media people crammed in here – newspaper, radio and television reporters, photographers, cameramen and sound recordists – most of them familiar, among them some young fresh-faced ones working for the local press and stringing for the nationals, hoping for their big break, and some old, weary ones just waiting to get out of here and into a pub.
    Flanking him, more to show that the police were taking this seriously than to actually contribute much to the conference, was the Assistant Chief Constable, Alison Vosper, a handsome but hard-looking woman of forty-four with blonde hair cropped short, standing in for the Chief, Jim Bowen – away at a conference – and Grace’s immediate superior, Gary Weston, the Chief Superintendent.
    Weston was a relaxed-looking thirty-nine-year-old Manchester man with charismatic charm, with whom Grace had been mates when they were both beat coppers, and they remained good friends now. Although almost the same age as Grace, Weston had played the politics, cultivated influential friends, his eyes firmly set on a chief constable career path – and with his abilities, maybe even the top