Short Ends

"You keep talking about bad news. How about you get on with it?"

The man looked at McNulty. "Very well. It's about your mother."

McNulty thought about growing up in an orphanage. "I don't have a mother."

The man disagreed. "Everybody has a mother. Yours is in a dementia care home in Yorkshire. She is very sick."

Yorkshire, England

While McNulty is helping Titanic Productions during filming near Boston, he gets a mysterious visitor. And some very bad news. At first, he swears he will never return to see the woman who had abandoned him as a child, but eventually, curiosity gets the better of him. He should have paid attention to the saying; curiosity killed the cat.

After a visit to his favourite Yorkshire cinema, things go from bad to worse. Somebody ransacks his hotel room, and tries to jump him on his way back from Hyde Park Picture House. It appears that remnants of Northern X - the child sex ring McNulty helped close down years ago - have a very long memory. And that's not even the bad news. It turns out McNulty's mother isn't who she seems to be. Meaning that McNulty might not be McNulty at all.