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    After Sir Bruce Collins’s visit, Macmillan asked his secretary to call in Dr Steven Dunbar. Dunbar had been a Sci-Med investigator for something over five years, and was currently on leave after his last assignment.
    ‘He’s only had a week of his leave,’ said Rose Roberts.
    ‘I’m aware of that, thank you,’ snapped Macmillan, ‘and of the tough time he had with his last job. But this won’t take him more than a couple of days, so please just make the call.’
    Steven Dunbar took the call as he was packing. ‘I was just about to head north to see my daughter,’ he told Miss Roberts.
    ‘I’m sorry. I did point out that you’d only had a week and post-operational leave is always a month, but he asked for you anyway. If it’s any help, he said it wouldn’t take long.’
    ‘All right.’ Steven grinned. ‘See you at three.’
    Steven had a lot of respect for John Macmillan, not least because of his unswerving loyalty to his staff and his constant battle to preserve Sci-Med’s independence and freedom of action. It had been his brainchild from the outset and had shown its worth many times over, uncovering crimes that otherwise might never have come to light. Sci-Med might be small but it was an object lesson in how a government department should be run. Against the modern trend, its administration had been kept to a minimum and existed first and foremost to serve front-line staff and smooth the way for them, rather than the other way round as was sadly the case in modern Britain. According to some of Steven’s medical friends, NHS staff now spent more time filling in forms and undergoing audits, assessments and appraisals than they did treating the sick.
    No one came directly to Sci-Med. It was one of its great strengths that its investigators, when appointed, brought with them a wide range of abilities and experience. Dunbar, as a medical investigator, was of course medically qualified, but he had chosen not to pursue a conventional career in medicine. After two hospital residencies following medical school, he had found that he simply did not have the heart for it. A strong, athletic young man, brought up amid the mountains of Cumbria, he had felt the need for more of a physical challenge.
    After some heart-searching he had joined the army at the end of his clinical year and had been assigned to the Parachute Regiment, where he had found all the physical challenge he could ever have hoped for, and more besides. He had thrived in this environment and had been trained as an expert in field medicine, an expertise he had been called upon to use on several occasions during his subsequent secondment to Special Forces. He had served all over the world and had been called upon to use not only his medical skills but often his powers of innovation and initiative. He would have liked nothing better than to stay with the SAS, but the nature of the job dictated that it be the province of young men and the time inevitably came when he had to step down, an ‘old’ man at the age of thirty-three.
    Luckily, the position at Sci-Med had arisen at exactly the right time. The job had seemed perfect in that, although he’d still require his medical qualifications, he was not going to end up in some bleak surgery, freezing warts off feet and dishing out antidepressant pills. Instead, he would be involved in Sci-Med’s day-to-day investigations. He would be given assignments judged suitable to his expertise and allowed to pursue them in his own way. Sci-Med would provide all the back-up he needed, ranging from expert advice to weapons if need be.
    From the Inspectorate’s point of view, Steven had appeared from the outset to be well suited to their requirements. He was a doctor with proven ability to survive and succeed in extremely demanding situations. Real situations, a far cry from the ‘How would you cross this imaginary river?’ problems of office team-building exercises. And so it had proved to be. Steven had