Free Closer Still by Jo Bannister

general feeling on the darker streets of Dimmock was that someone had been bound to do it sooner or later.
    Events then took an unexpected turn, signalled by the visit to Battle Alley Police Station of Assistant Chief Constable (Crime) Emily Blake. She arrived without warning and asked to see Detective Superintendent Deacon, and the radio room became a flurry of activity as people who generally had no idea where he was until a complaint came in tried to track him down.
    In fact he wasn’t far away – up on the Firestone Cliffs, interviewing the town’s other significant unconvicted criminal, Terry Walsh, about the death of his rival. Deacon and Walsh were old sparring partners: Walsh didn’t mind when Deacon said he’d have to take a rain check and hurried away.
    Driving back to town, he tried to work out which infringement of police procedure he was being accused of now. Not because he hadn’t infringed any, but because he infringed lots of them all the time. It made it hard to prepare a defence. He didn’t want to find himself explaining to the ACC some incident she didn’t actually know about.
    Probably , he thought, it was the snooker cue . Joe may not have reported it widely – it had done little for his reputation – but there was a witness, and the bartender had little reason to be discreet after his employer was dead. All it needed was for the story to have reached someone with an interest in embarrassing Deacon – professionally:
personally he remembered the moment with enormous satisfaction – and there was a wide choice. One of them could easily have made an anonymous phone call to Division.
    He toyed briefly, hurrying up the back steps from the car park, with the idea of claiming it was an accident. That he and Loomis were enjoying a friendly game of snooker when he got a thick contact and the tip shot off the ball and up Joe’s nose … But Emily Blake hadn’t reached the pinnacle of her profession by believing lies, even lies that were better constructed than that one. Deacon thought she’d staple his ear to his own blotter for trying it. He settled for the defence that had served him best down the years: silence and a dumb expression until he knew who had what on him.
    And in a way it served him this time too. She didn’t know about the snooker cue. She did know about Joe Loomis’s last words.
    And the way she knew was that he’d reported them. He’d made a full report of everything he knew or could surmise, then he’d got on with his job which was trying to find the killer. Not for a moment did he expect what was now on its way.
    â€˜Jack’ – if she’d been about to tear strips off him she’d have given him his full title – ‘when you were making this report, didn’t it occur to you how it was going to look?’
    Deacon genuinely didn’t understand. He frowned. ‘You mean, my typing …?’
    Blake breathed heavily at him. She was a couple of years younger than him, and better groomed, but otherwise they
had a lot in common. She’d come up through the ranks by sheer hard work and a leavening of inspiration, and was one of the few people that Deacon acknowledged as being capable of doing his job as well as he did. It might have been tacit, but they’d always had a lot of respect for one another.
    â€˜No,’ she said with heavy patience, ‘not the typing. The fact that, to someone who doesn’t know you – or rather, who knows you but not as well as I do – it might look as if Joe Loomis with his dying breath was trying to accuse you.
    Deacon dismissed that with an impatient hand. ‘Of course he wasn’t accusing me. He may or may not have been trying to accuse someone, but since he never got further than the first letter and we don’t have holding cells for one twenty-sixth of the population, I didn’t think it would be much help until we had