All he knew about it was that they had a Premier League football team that usually bumped along somewhere in the middle of the table. Raking up history lessons from school, he vaguely remembered it had grown rich in the nineteenth century on textiles, though he couldn’t recall whether it was cotton or wool. Or something else altogether. Had there been anything else in the nineteenth century? Linen, he supposed. Well, whatever. Nominally a detective sergeant, Tim liked to think of himself as above and beyond the narrow confines of rank. He’d taken a first in PPE at Jesus College, Oxford and had raced through the graduate fast-track process of the Metropolitan Police. He’d never had any intention of pounding the beat. He knew he was too smart for that. His goal had always been the cool end of the job, working in intelligence of one sort or another. He didn’t much mind whether it was NCIS or SOCA or Europol. As long as it provided a challenge and made him feel like he was one of that handful who truly made a difference.
