The look Zechariah fixed Crane with on prompting was long and silent for an uncomfortable moment. He still had not processed all the possibilities of what he had just read, and had felt the inexplicable urge to hide the damned thing from Crane the moment he heard him coming back. Never mind that he had read far saucier on the train, and God, probably in front of Crane, too.

“Auuh-nnn, heh,” was Zechariah’s unusually inarticulate answer. “Yes. God, yes. This belongs in the trash.”

However, he made no move to take it back out and throw it away. Whoever he had been talking to could have been any constable he had ever talked to. He could be sitting in front of him right now, even!

Pfah! That was ridiculous. Constable Crane? Had he ever taken off enough layers, even, for any living being to reach his heart? Zechariah cracked a smile and shook his head at that.

“Those records on Roger Heath,” he said, back to perfunctory, impersonal business. “How thick is the file?”