Before
When he looked back on things, Terry Reid was never quite sure how he had arrived at the place he was in, both actually and metaphorically speaking. Benefiting from any case he had worked on, however indirectly, had always seemed abhorrent to him. Relief had managed to overcome disappointment very easily when he had avoided promotion in the past. But since his elevation to the rank of detective inspector had been mainly due to the role he had played in apprehending a particularly disgusting paedophile, the thought that his so-called success was somehow tainted by association occasionally flitted through his thoughts.
However, detective inspector he was, and it would have been career suicide to have turned it down – well, that was what Jack Frost had told him, and in his typical manner had made it plain that if Reid did refuse the promotion, there would be a serious falling-out between the two of them. At least on Frost's part.
Staying on at Edmund Street was a plus, though; a transfer as well as a promoted post would have been much more difficult for him to handle, change being the nemesis it was to him. Reid had settled in well after his move there from Northcote, and although he kept in touch with some of the old faces – Gryff Coleman and Sheila Boydeau, to be precise – that particular change hadn't turned out to be the traumatic life event it might once have been. The elastic band on his wrist was gone, the twenty-Rothmans-a-day habit was going, and he saw his kids every other weekend. That was his life. Until Eric Hayden, that is.