HEAR ME TALKING TO YOU

Craig, better known as Bill James (Between Lives, 2004, etc.), shows just how dangerous it can be for a police officer to keep a confidential informant confidential.

Detective Constable Sally Bithron is sitting outside the rented Cardiff house where Brian Edward Aulus, aka Godzilla, has assured her a drug deal will go down when all hell breaks loose inside, leaving two men dead, a third dying and a fourth victim, mob daughter Avril Kale, comatose. Protecting Godzilla from the leaks that can crop up in even the best regulated cop shops, Sally tells her boss, Raging Bullfinch, and his boss, Supt. Ray Regnal, that she just happened to be driving past in time to have the authorities come pick up the bodies and chase the four men in balaclavas she saw leaving the scene. But it’s obvious that they suspect otherwise. So does Sally’s childhood friend Frank Latimer, who’s soon picked up as Suspect Four. In a masterful interrogation notable for James’s trademark circumlocutions, all parties involved make it clear that they each know the score and that nobody’s going to give an inch. The interrogation is a model for the rest of the dialogue in this terse, nasty little tale, which involves threats so deliciously veiled in so many directions that it’s just as well most of them don’t pan out.

So understated in its silky menace that you might think it had actually been written by Henry James.