We busted down Kubota’s door and found enough to put him away for a long time but Reacher had vanished from the hospital...

Ineed to know.’

‘Come back tomorrow.’

‘Did you find Kubota?’ No answer. I said, ‘Was there a confrontation?’ No answer. ‘Did Kubota shoot you?’ Reacher said nothing.

Then the doctor came in. The same woman, with the threads of silver in her hair. She told me she was terminating the interview immediately, on medical grounds. Which was frustrating, but not fatal. I had plenty of valuable data.

I left the building with visions of a major score in my head. A protection racket, busted, on my very first day in the department. Priceless. Women have to work twice as hard, to get half the credit. I went straight back to the station house. Unpaid, but I would have paid them. I found a thick file on Kubota. Lots of leads, lots of hours, but we never had enough to get a warrant.

Now we did, big time. We had gun crime. We had his victim, right there in the hospital. Eyewitness testimony. And possibly even the bullet itself, in a stainless steel dish somewhere. Solid gold. The judge agreed with me. He signed off on a big boilerplate warrant and I put a team together. Plenty of uniforms, cars, heavy weapons, three other detectives, all senior to me, but I was leading them. My case. An unwritten rule.

We executed the warrant at midnight, which was legal-speak for busting down Kubota’s door, and knocking him over, and bouncing his head off the tile a couple of times.

We found the guy from the bar in a back room, in a bad way. Like he had been run over by a truck.

I had him taken to a different hospital, under guard.

Then the uniforms hauled Kubota away to a holding cell and I and my three detective partners spent most of the rest of the night going through his place like we were looking for a tiny flake of chrome off the world’s smallest needle in the world’s biggest haystack.

His place was a treasure trove. We found grocery sacks full of unexplained cash, and 30 different bank accounts, and notebooks and ledgers and diaries and maps. It was clear from our first glance the guy was making serious money from a hundred different establishments.

According to his notes, in the last six months, three places had tried to resist, and we called in the dates and matched them to three unexplained arson attacks.

We found temporary interruptions in two sets of payments, and when we checked the dates with hospitals we found one broken leg and one slashed face. We had everything. Except the gun.

But that made sense, in its way. He had used it, and he had ditched it. Standard

We had gun crime. We had the victim right there in the hospital, and possibly the bullet

practice. It would be in the river, thrown from a bridge. Like his old cell phones, presumably. Pay-as-you-go burners. He had ditched the packaging and the paperwork, but for some dumb reason not the chargers. We found nearly 50 in a drawer.

At dawn I was face to face with him in an interview room. He had a lawyer with him, a slick guy in a suit, but I could tell by the guy’s face he knew a defence was hopeless.

On our side it was just me, all alone, but I guessed there was a crowd behind the one-way glass, to watch the mojo working. And it worked very well at first. I like to get a suspect in the habit of saying yes, one confession after the other, so I started with the easy stuff.

I went through one bar after another, all the restaurants and diners, and I told him we had the notebooks and the ledgers and the diaries, and the cash and the bank statements, and he admitted them all.

Ten minutes after I started we had enough on tape to put him away for a long, long time. But I kept him going, not because we really needed it, but because I wanted him warmed up for the big moment.

Which didn’t happen. He denied the shooting. He denied meeting Reacher the night before.

He said he had been out of town. He denied owning a gun. He said he had never used one.

I kept at him until the clock ticked around and my second day in the department officially began.

Then my lieutenant came in, fresh from a night’s sleep and a shower, and he told me to quit. He said, ‘No harm, no foul. You’ve done great. We have enough. He’s going down for a long time. The goal has been achieved.’ Which was the general opinion in the department. There was no sense of failure. Quite the reverse. The new girl had busted a racket, on her first day on the job. A major score.

But it rankled with me. I didn’t do the work I was supposed to do, and I dug deeper. I knew I would find something, and I did. But not what I was expecting.

The bar owner Reacher had seen was the doctor’s brother-in-law. The woman with silver in her hair. They were family.

I was dizzy with fatigue, which helped, in a way. I made lightning connections a rational mind might have dismissed. Kubota’s thick file, full of failed attempts to win a warrant. The endless quest for more. The need to see someone beaten, or worse.

The relentless beep of Reacher’s bedside monitor, too strong for a sick man. His clear eyes and his lucid mind, after opiates said to be strong enough to fell a horse.

I made my third trip to the hospital. Reacher’s room was empty. There were no signs of recent occupation.

The woman with silver in her hair swore she had treated no gunshot victims on the night in question.

She invited me to check her records. Her records were blank.

I sat down with the nurses, one at a time. No one talked. Then I pictured

Reacher, on the night in question, unable to find Kubota because Kubota was out of town. I pictured him heading back to the bar, handing back the money, working out a long-term solution with the owner.

I pictured the owner, calling his sister-in-law. I pictured the Greyhound depot at midnight. A tall figure getting on a bus. The bus rolling out. No bags, no schedule, no plan.

I went back to the station house. I walked in, and they gave me a round of applause.

■ Extracted from No Middle Name: The Complete Collected Jack Reacher Stories, published in paperback by Bantam, priced £8.99. Copyright © Lee Child 2017. The latest Jack Reacher novel, Blue Moon, is out in paperback on April 2, also Bantam, £8.99.