Free Driving into Darkness (DI Angus Henderson 2) by Iain Cameron Page A

of the top brass of Sussex Police where he received a bollocking.
    During a tense meeting which included his boss, Chief Inspector Steve Harris, the Assistant Chief Constable, Andy Youngman, the man with overall responsibility for CID, and a bod from Professional Standards, he tried to explain why the story in The Argus about Mrs Frankcombe was not a good enough reason to sack him.
    If CI Harris had his way, Henderson wouldn’t be sitting in his office in Sussex House right now but making his way down to the Employment Office to sign on, unless unbeknown to him, the whole system had now gone on-line. Perhaps he needed to check it out in case an incident like this ever happened again.
    Harris always had a bee in his bonnet about Henderson ever since the DI joined Sussex Police and their relationship and his behaviour, according his brother, Corporal Archie Henderson, was not dissimilar to the way a raw Sandhurst officer dealt with a seasoned platoon leader or sergeant, but even though Henderson hadn’t been fast-tracked as Harris had been, he wasn’t the mug his boss took him for.
    It was a good job Andy Youngman was on his side and prevented Harris from saying something he would regret, as he understood his officers needed to have a blowout once in a while. What annoyed him though, was receiving a lecture about the best way to handle the press and a proposal from Professional Standards to put his name down for a media training course, as he had been working on this topic from the day he joined Sussex Police over three years ago.
    Before coming south, he had worked for Strathclyde Police in an undercover unit, targeting large and vicious drug gangs. In one particular tense standoff, he killed one member of a gang and injured another. While some sections of the press hailed him as a hero for saving the lives of fellow officers, others pilloried him for killing ‘an innocent man.’ They forgot that the victim, Sean Fagin, had been an integral member of a gang that for years, had been engaged in the importation of heroin, crack cocaine, and crystal meth, bringing misery to thousands and not forgetting he was about to shoot a police officer; namely him.
    Since then, he had been working on improving his relationship with the press, aided and abetted by his girlfriend, Rachel Jones, a journalist with The Argus . Her beat was the environment and rural affairs but she knew all the crime reporters at the newspaper, the main attendees of police press conferences and the people most likely to doorstep him or any member of his team.
    It didn’t mean he would be taking Rob Tremain, The Argus’s chief crime reporter out for a beer sometime soon, or the way he felt now, stringing him up from the nearest lamppost for writing the Frankcombe story. He had to accept that Tremain reported, more or less what the woman told him and he would continue to treat him and his colleagues as allies and not adversaries.
    DS Walters walked into his office, holding a thin file. It had to be the violent car stealing gang file, as the other cases on his plate, an armed robbery in Hove and a domestic murder in Patcham, were much thicker.
    ‘Morning sir. How are you today?’
    ‘Not smelling of booze, you’ll be pleased to hear.’
    ‘Bloody hell,’ she said, her face crinkling in shock. ‘I’m sorry, have I put my foot in it?’
    ‘Nah, don’t worry about it, Carol. I’ll get over it, I just hope Harris does as well.’
    ‘Do I gather from your glum expression, you’ve been over at Malling House this morning?’
    ‘Aye, I have,’ he said, taking a seat around the small conference table.
    She waited for more but as he wasn’t offering, she gave up and opened the file.
    ‘As I said at the last team meeting,’ Henderson said, ‘I’m changing our focus to concentrate more on the sales side.’
    ‘I thought Tony Haslam said he thought the thieves and the ringers are most likely two separate gangs, so nicking one might not give us the