PLOTS AND ERRORS : Extract

Detective Chief Inspector Lloyd looked at the two bodies in elderly Ford Fiesta, and sighed.

The man, he had never met. He was about Lloyd's own age - late forties, early fifties; difficult to say at the best of times, and this was not the best of times. He had more hair than Lloyd, but most people did. He had the same dark colouring, but he was much bigger, taller. The car had been specially adapted for a disabled driver; he was in the driving seat.

The woman he had met, and had worked with, but that was a long time ago now. She had been twenty-four when he'd seen her last; she had left the job to marry the man whose hand she had been holding while their car had filled with lethal fumes, pumped through a vacuum-cleaner hose from the exhaust pipe.
The Medical Examiner straightened up from the car. 'Life pronounced extinct at…' She looked at her watch. 'Eleven-seventeen a.m.,' she said, and smiled at Lloyd. 'I'm a bit puzzled about why you're here, Chief Inspector. How come you got called out? Am I missing something?'

'No,' Lloyd said. 'You're not missing anything. I'm not here on duty - the officers dealing thought I'd want to know, that's all.'

He could hear his own Welshness when he spoke; usually his accent was very carefully controlled, ranging from barely discernible to impenetrable, depending on the impression he was choosing to give. It was when he got what Detective Sergeant Finch called a gut-feeling that it popped out all by itself. From his soul, he liked to think, rather than his gut.