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there something, Inspector Priest?’ the DCC was saying, his head tilted forward so he could see me all the better through his bifocals.
    ‘Er, not really, sir,’ I improvised. ‘Superintendent Isles was just commenting that you’ll be sorely missed.’
    A murmur of amusement ran round the table andthe assorted chief supers and bog-standard supers who represented their divisions at the SCOG meeting took it as a signal and closed their notebooks. They eased their chairs away from the table to notify the chairman that he was pushing his luck if he thought he was going to keep them here much longer.
    ‘Before we finish…’ the boss remonstrated, determined to show us that he wasn’t gone yet,’… could we just wind up by going round the table. Anything you’d like to raise, George?’ he asked the person sitting on his immediate left.
    ‘No, I think we’ve covered everything,’ George replied, clipping his pen into his inside pocket for emphasis.
    ‘No,’ the next in line added.
    Shakes of the head and various negative expressions answered the DCC’s query as his glance moved round the table, towards me.
    I couldn’t resist it. Not often do I have so many bigwigs hanging on my words while slavering in anticipation of the pre-prandial gin and tonic that the little lady was no doubt mixing at that very second. The bifocals flickered in my direction and moved on, but not quickly enough.
    ‘There is just one thing, sir,’ I said.
    They stopped, hesitated, swung back and settled on me like the searchlight at a PoW camp finding a luckless escapee. There was a rumble of groans andthe clump of chairs falling back onto four legs. I had them in the palm of my hand.
    ‘If we could go back to item seven on the agenda…’ I continued. Papers were retrieved from executive-style briefcases and shuffled impatiently.
    The DCC said: ‘Item seven? Retrospective DNA testing? I thought we’d given it a good airing, Mr Priest. You made it quite plain, if you don’t mind me saying so, that Heckley was way ahead of the rest of us in reopening unsolved cases where DNA evidence was available.’
    ‘Yes, sir, and with a certain amount of success. As I told the meeting earlier we were able to associate two rapes with a villain already in custody, and a murder with a dead suspect. However, if we examine the statistics, I believe they lead us to consider new lines of enquiry.’
    The person on my left sighed and tapped his pencil, but the chairman leant forward on his elbows and Les Isles said: ‘Go on, Charlie.’
    Nothing would have stopped me. ‘If I could just invent some figures, to illustrate my point,’ I responded. ‘If we go back, for convenience, for, say, twenty unsolved major crimes – murders – in the Yorkshire region. There might be four of those where old DNA samples are available which were of little significance at the time of the offence. The new techniques allow us to link crimes in away which was unheard of just a few years ago. Our experience at Heckley indicates that of those four crimes with DNA availability, it is highly probable that we will find links. Supposing, for example, we link two of the crimes to the same villain. All well and good. We rope him in, present the evidence, and he gets a few more years on his sentence, probably running concurrently with what he’s already serving if he’s in custody.’
    There were murmurs of approval at my disdain for concurrent sentences. It proved they were listening.
    ‘But!’ I went on, raising my hand as if plucking a plum, as I’d seen the Prime Minister do. ‘But what about the other sixteen cases where there is no DNA evidence? The statistics indicate that eight of those crimes could quite easily have been committed by the same person. Maybe we should be taking a new look at all of them. DNA testing isn’t the only new tool we have.’
    They were silent. They had been listening, unless they’d fallen asleep. ‘Profiling,’ someone