Chapter One
Embedded
Worthbridge didn’t look dangerous.
Not from the motorway. Nor from the blinking welcome sign wedged between a retail park and a Costa. And certainly not from the quiet sprawl of terraced rooftops curling towards the choppy sea, where church spires rose like sentinels in the coastal mist. On the surface, this one looked a doddle.
DS Warren Beckford had been in far worse places.
But he knew better than to judge a place by its postcard front. Years buried in organised crime cases, deep undercover, long hours shifting lies, Warren had learned one thing above all. It was always the quiet towns that bled the deepest.
So he pulled into a car park behind a shuttered community centre, where the Southeast Regional Organised Crime Unit (SEROCU) had set up a temporary field base, and got his game face on.
New case. New team. New name.
Another life to disappear into.
He killed the engine of his black MG, stepped out, and locked it, flicking the keys between his fingers. Then, after tying back his collar-length locs and checking his reflection in the blacked-out windows of his car, he tucked his sunglasses into the V of his white tee and approached the squat brick building. Boots heavy. Mind already shifting into gear.
He buzzed for entry.
A beat.
Then a voice crackled through the box: “Yeah?”
“DS Beckford. Reporting in.”
There was a pause. Then the lock buzzed, releasing with a solid click.
Warren pushed open the door, stepping into a corridor lined with blank noticeboards and peeling paint, remnants of the community centre’s old life. The lingering scent of instant coffee and worn-out carpet welcomed him in, along with the man standing at the end. Warren did his usual check. White, mid-forties. Buzz-cut, greying at the edges. Suit creased but clean, and the lanyard tucked into his breast pocket identified him as DI Luke Havers. Warren knew the type. Ex-Met, by the stance. Probably driven. Definitely bitter.
Warren held up his ID card.
Havers glanced at him, sharp enough to cut glass. “Top of the stairs. Briefing Room Three. Patel’s waiting.” He turned away, but not before muttering, “Try not to piss anyone off before we start.”
Warren offered a faint smile, dry and deliberate. “No promises.”
His past preceded him all the way to this small town on the Essex coast, did it?Standard.
He took the stairs two at a time. Not out of urgency, but habit. And he moved down the corridor towards Briefing Room Three,where the air grew heavier the closer he got. He rapped his knuckles on the open door, stepping into a cloud of stale coffee and unspoken tension, the room thick enough with it to mask his own hotel shower gel and splash of Paco Rabanne. Inside, the task force had claimed the space as their own, as they always did: a whiteboard cluttered with red string, black-and-white mugshots, and marker-smeared code names. Movement charts. Routes in and out. It was always the same: a theatre of war, laid out in marker pen, Post Its and Blu Tack.
And there, front and centre, was the one who’d pulled him into this mess.
“DS Beckford, come in.” DCI Shalini Patel, head of the Radley task force and the one who’d dragged his name from whatever dusty file still flagged him as“high-value asset”instead of“disciplinary headache”, had been the one to pluck him out of his quiet desk exile in London.
He knew how these things worked. They brought in someone like him for three reasons: one, they were trying to bury him quietly, wrap up the loose threads left behind in London and keep him out of anyone’s line of sight. Two, they needed his skillset. Deep cover. Social engineering. The dirty detail that didn’t get typed into a warrant.
And three…Yeah, sometimes, he knew, they needed a Black face in the field.
He didn’t care which it was. As long as it got him off a desk, he could live with anything. Because desk duty? That was another kind of hell.
Warren dropped into the chair closest to the wall, instinctively angling his body to watch the exits. Two years undercover in the backstreets of south London had rewired him that way. Twitchy with his back exposed and learning to read a room in a blink. Gang culture had made him live in his peripherals.
He offered a single nod to the woman at the front.
“Morning, team.” Patel didn’t bother with pleasantries and with one click of the projector remote, the hum of chatter died. “As I’m sure most of you could recite in your sleep, Graham Radley has been the subject of ongoing investigations for years. But for the record, and because clarity is everything, let me explain exactly where we stand, and why this task force exists.”
She inclined her head at the next slide. A professionally edited headshot filled the wall. Not a mugshot. No, that man on the screen hadn’t ever touched the inside of a custody suite. He’d dodged the system for far too long. And Warren clenched his jaw as the all-too-familiar itch in his blood forced him upright. That was the drive in him that never quieted until a so-called untouchable finally hit the ground. This was his work. His purpose. Bringing down the bastards who strutted outside the law’s reach.
