Page 39 of Better the Devil

Thanks to that suggestion, he was now desperately tryingnotto imagine a sea of wrinkled bare flesh spread out before him.

Unfortunately, he wasn’t having much luck.

‘So, um, aye. Thanks,’ he began, but he was far too close to the microphone, so all that emerged was a robotic-sounding roar that crackled and hissed over the speakers.

He drew back a bit, cleared his throat, and tried again.

‘Sorry. Technology, eh?’ he said, and while that joke had absolutely killed when Sergeant Fleck made it, it now clanged in the booming silence.

He swallowed. The microphone picked it up and broadcast it around the entire hall. When he looked over at Ben for support, the former DI stood frozen, a biscuit pinched between two fingers and held motionless in his tea.

‘You’re doing great.’

The words were a whisper from Hamza’s right. Sergeant Fleck stood with his hands crossed behind his back. He gave the DI a nod of encouragement, then smiled out at the room at large.

Hamza knew he shouldn’t be here. He shouldn’t be on this stage, shouldn’t be in this room. Shouldn’t be in this job, maybe. There was so much to do, so much to learn, so many differences between this role and the last.

A man was dead.

An investigation was in full swing.

And he was holding an envelope with stars drawn on the front.

He should’ve seen Mitchell’s email. He should’ve read that memo. Maybe then, he’d have written a speech. Or, ideally, found a way to get out of the whole bloody thing.

But he didn’t. He hadn’t. He wasn’t ready.

Maybe for any of it.

He wasn’t speaking, he realised. Nobody was. The whole hall was silent. Expectant. Waiting.

For him.

A little voice in Hamza’s head screamed at him to say something, to just say something, to sayanything.

‘I, eh… I don’t really know what I’m doing.’

The words came from nowhere, so out of the blue that Hamza started to glance around to see who had said them, before realising it had been him.

Grey eyebrows frowned in confusion all around the floor. Heads tilted, legs crossed. Fingers were steepled as the HAWKS leaned in to listen.

‘I don’t think we admit that enough,’ he continued. ‘I don’t think we admit how out of our depth we are sometimes.’

The little voice in his head that had been urging him to speak now screamed at him toshut the fuck up.

‘I’m new to this. All this,’ Hamza continued. Sweat glistened on the lectern when he shifted his hands, adjusting his grip on the wooden plinth. ‘You can probably tell I’ve got no idea what I’m doing.’

There was a chuckle. Just one at first, but it rippled outwards a row or two before dying away.

‘But I’m going to do my best. That’s what we do every day, I suppose. Personally. And in the police as a whole. We’re not perfect. I know I’m not. But we do our best.’

Hamza took a breath. Swallowed again.

‘And, well, there are times when, no matter how hard we try, we need a bit of help. All of us. There are times when we realise that we can’t necessarily do everything on our own. And that’s OK. That’s good, in fact. Because it forces us to make connections. To reach out to one another. To ask for support, and offer it in return.’

There was some murmured agreement from the crowd. Over on Hamza’s left, Ben Forde muttered, ‘Ah, shite,’ as his biscuit lost its structural integrity and collapsed into his tea.

Hamza could sense a way out now, though. There was a path ahead, he just had to take it.