The Iago Factor

DI John Hunter is back again and faced with one of his hated 'Thursday' murders: the partly decomposed body of a young girl dressed in authentic looking police uniform, fished out of the Thames at Staines. He knows that with no scene of crime, and any clues lost due to water and other damage, he is on a hiding to nothing, but that death has to go onto the back burner while he investigates the murder of a senior police officer, Commander Freddie Sloane, who headed up Vice.

It gradually becomes obvious that someone out there is determined to destroy John's marriage, using false evidence of both his and Jane's apparent infidelities and Jane's involvement in Freddie Sloane's murder. Her pistol, kept in their personal safe, was used to kill the Commander, and other equally damning evidence piles up against her, leading to her arrest on what appears to be a slam-dunk affair.

John is taken off the case, but continues investigating, receiving death threats from the Russian mafia along the way.

One of his suspects is Freddie Sloane's eldest daughter, and she is involved with a woman who runs a home for battered women. John is surprised to find one of his old loves, Maria, who is a technical wizard, in charge, and while there also sees a young Russian girl who is hiding from the mob.

Believing that some of the answers might be found there he arranges to have a colleague inserted undercover into the home.

He enlists the aid of his old friend Paddy and has him use his intercept techniques to eavesdrop on the leading players, and he learns that the mafia are about to raid the home to take back their 'possession': the young girl John saw there.

He and Paddy race there but arrive too late; the girl has gone and Maria has been killed.

The pieces come together and he locates the killer, but when he learns the facts he wants to 'look the other way', as he has done more than once before.

His detective partner will not agree and he is unable to do so, which results in the murderer's suicide, but John has been told enough to realise that both murders are related, and for Jane to be released.

With both cases closed, he attends Freddie Sloane's funeral, where he finds out that he has been a puppet, played throughout like an old, worn out one-string fiddle.

It is something he will never share with anyone, not even Jane.