Nico led him through the charge office towards the back of the police station. They walked up the dirty stairs in silence. The staircase smelt of urine and other body fluids that Nico didn’t even want to think about. The station was not one of the cleanest in the city. He couldn’t fathom why people used the stairs to take a piss when there were perfectly good toilets just down the passage. He only hoped that it wasn’t his fellow policemen using the stairs as a toilet. The task team's operations room was on the first floor.
Nico led Louis along a narrow passage. Instead of plastering the walls in the station, they had just painted over the brick, alternating between white and institutional-blue panels of paint. It was the same blue as the hanging files in his filing cabinet. There were dir
