"Blood Work" - читать интересную книгу автора (Pearson Mark)

DAY ONE

Six thirty and fog hung in the morning air like lowlying cloud.

Arnold Fraser shambled through the wet undergrowth on South Hampstead Common. He had spent the previous night huddled in the entrance to the local Tube station. In a different life he once had been a sergeant in the Royal Green Rifles, but he had come back from the first Gulf war with a shattered right femur and a broken mind. In a country that treats its old war heroes with pomp and ceremony every November and its returning soldiers rather less well, he ended up, like many of his comrades lucky enough to make it home, as an alcoholic, mentally ill and living on the cold and comfortless streets of London. Early commuters had disturbed his lager-fuelled sleep and he was setting out across the common to a homeless shelter where he could get a hot cup of tea and a moderately warm bacon sandwich.

His bladder full, he stopped to relieve himself against a tree, but even as he fumbled with his trouser zipper, hidden deep under many layers of shirts, jumpers and coats, he saw the body lying in the undergrowth near his feet, saw the unnatural pallor of her skin, alabaster against the black shine of her hair, and knew it for what it was. He had seen enough corpses in his days of service. He turned away and shuffled off. He'd learned that in the army as well. Never volunteer. Never get involved. He'd done that once for Queen and Country and what had he got for his troubles? Royally fucked over, that's what. He spat and limped onwards. Let the citizens deal with it.

Seven o'clock. Kevin Norrell was back in the communal shower room of Bayfield Prison. He took the towel from his waist, put it to one side and twisted the dial set into the wall, standing beneath the jets of water as he let them pummel his massive, chemically enhanced body and groaned in satisfaction. He had spent the last hour lifting weights in the prison gym. Being on remand had not affected his workout routines at all and he intended to leave in better physical condition than he entered. Having an office right across the road from a burger bar had helped put a layer of fat over the hard muscles of his stomach. But that fat was being quickly burned away, and with every bench press he had but a single thought in his mind. Kevin Norrell didn't intend spending much more time inside prison walls and to escape he needed to be moved to another, lower security facility. He grunted as he turned the heat up on the shower. He'd already made a start towards the road to freedom and this morning he'd take another step and it wouldn't be long before he was moved to the prison of his choice. He could practically guarantee it.

He poured some shower gel in his hand, his eyes flicking back and forth watchfully as he did so. It was a reflex you needed to develop in prison, if you wanted to survive, and if Kevin Norrell had learned one thing in all his time over the years in institutions and prisons it was that you never dropped your guard. Put it in the bank. You dropped your guard and you'd be fucked ten ways by Sunday. Especially in the shower. He continued soaping his body and let the powerful jets pummel the suds away, but he kept the shampoo from his hair, keeping his eyes clear. As he reached up to turn the shower off he felt, rather than saw, the three men who approached, moving on him fast now. He flailed out instinctively, slamming his ham-like fist sideways, crushing one man's throat and knocking him down before the others held his arm and two more came into the shower room. He felt himself being pushed to the floor, and charging foward he fell; landing on one knee in a toilet stall, he reached out, putting his arms around the stainless-steel base of the lidless toilet and gripping hard. One of the men pummelled his head with a heavy fist as the other kicked him viciously in the ribs, trying to dislodge him. He felt a rib crack. Norrell grunted with pain and anger and wrenched upward, tearing the bowl clear from the floor as his steroid-enhanced, brute strength ripped the screws free. He roared up, red-faced, furious with effort and smashed the bowl full into the face of the first man, the second slipping on the water that was now gushing from the exposed plumbing. He smashed the bowl again, turning the fallen man's head into a shapeless mass of blood and hair, and swung the bowl at the head of another man who was trying to escape, the man screamed like a frightened pig as the lavatory bowl smashed into his jaw, pulverising it. There were just two of his attackers left now but they backed off as he turned and snarled at them, holding the steel toilet bowl like the weapon of a demented, lavatorial gladiator. Norrell moved towards them but his right foot slipped on the wet floor and he dropped to his knee again, wincing with pain as his cracked rib flexed. One of the men jumped forward at him, a blade flashing in the brightness of the overhead lights, and a thin shaft of steel was punched hard into his ribcage. His other knee buckled and he dropped to the floor barely registering the shouts and cries of uniformed guards running into the room. His vision blurred and he struggled to draw air, his breath a painful, wet wheeze. He tried to raise himself up but those muscles that defined him in more senses than one, those muscles that had been built over years of dedicated and painful exercise, failed him at last. He slumped back on to the cold tiles like an exhausted walrus and as the blood pumped from his body, the room seemed to darken and the light, very slowly, faded from his eyes.

A muffled knocking sound brought Delaney groaning to consciousness. He half opened a gummed-up eye and cursed as a bright, white light stabbed into his sore optic nerves. He held an arm across his face and groaned again. As far he could tell, he was lying, fully dressed, on a cold concrete floor, but he had absolutely no idea where. A sharp pain lanced through the back of his skull as he tried to move, and he gasped out loud. He crinkled his eyes again to open them a merest crack. He was in a white room. Bare white walls, white ceiling and a painted concrete floor. A light bulb dangled overhead and there was a low, mechanical, murmuring hum coming from somewhere close by. Delaney's head felt like he had been hit by a heavy, blunt object, but he had no memory of it. He rolled to one side, wincing with pain, and slowly opened one eye again. As his vision blurred into near focus he could make out a chest freezer against the opposite wall from where he was lying. He realised that was where the humming was coming from. The knocking resumed and Delaney suddenly realised where he was. He had made it home, but only as far as his garage. He rolled over again, covering his eyes, and tried to ignore the knocking which was becoming more urgent now, snatches of memory coming back to him of the night that had just passed.

But the knocking persisted. Delaney stood up, wincing as the blood flowed through the sore and swollen areas of his brain and lurched to the garage door. He opened it, shielding his face against the sudden lash of wind and rain that spiralled in, and looked angrily over at the attractive young woman, dressed in a smart black suit, who was standing on his front doorstep.

'What the hell are you doing here, Sally?'

DC Sally Cartwright smiled at him, enthusiasm and energy radiating from her like a Ready Brek advert.

'The chief inspector thought-'

'She thought what?' Delaney barked. And regretted it immediately.

'She thought that you might like someone to drive you for your meeting with Norrell. She mentioned dropping you off at the Tube station last night.'

'Did she?'

Sally smiled again, innocently. 'She suspected you might not have gone straight home, sir.'

Delaney flapped his hand and gestured her in. '"Meeting", you make it sound like a bloody sales conference, and for God's sake, come in, Constable.'

Sally walked into the built-in garage, gratefully shutting the door on the wind and rain behind her.

'What the hell happened to summer?'

'Don't know, sir.'

'Come through.'

Delaney led her through the garage up a couple of small steps and into the kitchen that lay off it. It was almost as bare as the garage. White modern units, but nothing personal, no pictures or furniture. A kettle on the countertop. A couple of mugs. A whisky tumbler. Delaney opened some cupboards, scowled and shut them again. 'Have you got any Nurofen on you, Sally?'

She shook her head. 'Sorry, sir.'

'Co-codamol? Paracetamol? Aspirin? Anadin? Ibuprofen? Panadol?'

'Don't use them, sir.'

Delaney slammed a drawer shut, frustrated, and again regretted it. 'You'll learn,' he said, wincing.

'I've got a line of coke.'

Delaney looked across at her, half hopeful, and Sally laughed. 'Joking, sir.'

Delaney nodded. 'Not funny, Constable.' There was a time when Delaney had used the stuff, and not that long ago. Only a little dab now and again, mind, a wet tip of a finger's worth, to keep him sharp. But the business with Walker and Bonner had made him more circumspect. He'd never been a user. Whiskey was his drug of choice, even using the Scottish variety lately. And cigarettes of course. The day they made them illegal was the day he resigned for good. He fumbled in his pockets and pulled out a packet. 'You got a lighter, Sally?'

'You shouldn't smoke in the house, sir.'

'It's my goddamn house.'

'Exactly. And you want to keep it nice, sir.' She smiled, taking the edge of her words. 'For your daughter's sake.'

Delaney cursed and stuffed the packet back in his jacket pocket then sketched a hand in the air. 'What do you think of it?'

Sally smiled politely. 'Very minimalist.'

Delaney opened another cupboard and found a jar of coffee. 'Not got round to sorting it out yet.'

'How long have you been here?'

'A week.'

'Just a suggestion, but maybe some furniture.'

'You any idea what this cost?'

Sally shrugged. 'Three-bedroomed house, integral garage, Belsize Park? Way out of my league.'

'An arm and a fucking leg that's what it cost me. You want to investigate serious fraud, look into the price of property.'

'You don't have to tell me.'

Delaney found a couple of mugs and poured some coffee into them. 'Karl Marx had the right of the matter, I reckon.' He opened the integrated fridge and cursed. 'No frigging milk.'

Sally smiled. 'I'm all right anyway, sir.'

'Well, you bloody would be. We'll get one on the way. Just have a seat and look shiny. I won't be a minute.'

Delaney opened the door to the lounge. Sally went through to the lounge as Delaney headed upstairs. It was a large room with French windows leading on to a small courtyard garden. Like the kitchen the lounge was noticeably devoid of furniture, but there were some packing cases, one of which had a small television sitting on top of it. The walls were bare. The house, unlike its owner, was a blank canvas.

Sally sat on one of the packing cases and felt a spark of jealousy. A three-bedroomed house spitting distance from the station. Like she had said it was far more than her salary could afford, could ever afford looking at the way house prices had gone, never mind the recent fall. Ten per cent or twenty per cent off bleeding expensive was still way out of her league. She hoped Delaney got round to buying some furniture and making it a proper home soon, though. Criminal waste otherwise. Delaney had only bought the house, she knew, so that his young daughter, Siobhan, could visit him sometimes. After the death of his wife, Delaney's life had been such a train wreck that he didn't even have to think about it when his sister-in-law, Wendy, offered to look after his young girl. That was four years ago, though, his daughter was now seven years old, and the fact that Delaney had wanted to make a home for her with him, at least for some of the time, was a mark of how much he had changed, even in the little time she had known him. The poor girl had been through a lot recently, her aunt stabbed in her own home while Siobhan was held captive upstairs by his deranged ex-boss Superintendent Walker. Delaney and Kate Walker had arrived just in time to save them both; she shuddered at the thought of what might have happened if they hadn't. But Wendy had survived, though she had needed several weeks' recuperation in a private hospital and would be discharged soon. Perhaps Siobhan could get some stability back in her young life. Sally decided she would do her bit, she'd get Delaney to furnish his house properly if she had to drag him down to Ikea herself!

A short while later and Delaney was back downstairs. He'd had a shave, changed his shirt and put some eye drops in. He didn't look a million dollars she thought, but it was a vast improvement to the raw-eyed man who had greeted her at the garage door. A couple of hundred euros maybe.

'Come on, then.' Delaney led her back through the garage and out into the rain. He scowled up at the sky. 'What's the deal? We don't get autumn any more, it just goes straight from summer to winter.'

'Global warming, sir.'

'Global warming my arse. In the seventies they reckoned it was the Russians fucking about with the weather. But do you know what it's really down to, Detective Constable?'

'Sir?'

'England, Sally. That's what it's down to. God's punishing us, each and every one of us. And He's doing it by making us live in this shitehole of a country.'

Sally followed him out the door, not replying. She guessed some people just weren't morning persons.

The window was slightly open and the wind whistling outside knocked the blind against the wooden frame with an inconsistent rhythm. Kate woke slowly. Lifting one eyelid, she winced a little and closed it again. She murmured softly and turned on to her side. She reached out a hand and snaked her fingers through the man's curly hair and smiled. 'Jack, wake up.'

She slid her hand down over his shoulder to tangle her fingers in his chest hair, only his skin was completely smooth. She frowned, puzzled for a moment, then her smile faded, her eyes shot open with realisation and she looked, horrified, at the naked man sleeping beside her in her bed.

'Shit!'

She turned over again and looked at the clock radio on her bedside cabinet. It was half past seven. She cursed again and tried to remember what had happened the night before. And couldn't.

'Shit.'

Quarter to eight and the rain was still falling, although lighter than it had been. Detective Inspector Jack Delaney and Detective Constable Sally Cartwright were stamping their feet as they stood outside 'Bab's Kebabs' burger van round the corner from the police station. Roy, the corpulent owner and chef, was flipping bacon on the hot griddle plate as Delaney and Sally sheltered from the persistent drizzle as much as they could under the awning.

'Point in case…' He pointed his egg slice at Delaney. 'What did you reckon of Madonna's "American Pie", Inspector?'

Delaney shrugged. 'I liked it.'

'Yeah, well, you would. My point exactly. Every man and his dog in the rest of the world thinks it's a piece of shit, but you like it.'

'It's a song, not a sacred cow. People should be more tolerant.'

Roy laughed. 'Ever heard of the pot and the kettle?' He fixed Delaney with a puzzled expression. 'I heard you'd quit the job anyway.'

'I did.'

'What happened then?'

'Shit happened, Roy. You ought to know about that. And they needed me to clean it up. Only man for the job.'

Roy winked at Sally. 'And I bet you're right glad to have this little ray of bog-trotting sunshine back.'

Sally laughed. 'We're all glad.'

Roy shook his head. 'Yeah, well, I wouldn't be betting any large change on that.'

Delaney stirred some sugar in his coffee. 'You got that right.'

Sally took a sip of her herbal tea. 'Why?'

'He put down some of your own, Detective Constable. Never very popular thing to do.'

Delaney scowled at Roy. 'I didn't sign up for the police force to win popularity contests.'

Roy handed a bacon sandwich over the counter to him. 'Just watch your back is all I'm saying, cowboy. You put the Pied Piper away, doesn't mean there isn't more of the vermin that were on his payroll still on the job, scratching their feet and sniffing their noses in the air.' He looked pointedly across as a couple of uniforms approached.

Delaney took a bite out of his sandwich. 'I'll bear it in mind.' He turned back to Sally. 'Come on, let's get out of here.'

Roy called after him. 'Madonna? My doughnut more like!'

Delaney walked off, Sally took a couple of gulps of her tea and threw the cup in the black plastic dustbin at the side of the van. 'Cheers, Roy.'

'De nada. And you watch your back too, Detective Constable. That man is a disaster area in size ten brogues.'

Sally winked at him. 'At least you know where you are with him.'

Roy nodded. 'In fucking trouble most like.' Roy turned to the two uniformed constables who had arrived and were watching Sally hurry after Delaney with undisguised appreciation. Roy grunted at them. 'Out of your league, boys. Out of your league.'

'Just give us a couple of bacon rolls, Roy.'

Roy leaned forward confidentially. 'Can I interest you lads in some pirate DVDs?'

The older uniform sighed patiently. 'Go on?'

'I've got Treasure Island, The Black Hawk, and of course Pirates of the Caribbean, the complete boxed set.'

Neither of the uniforms laughed.

Kate stood for a long while in the bathroom. The clothes she had been wearing last night were in a heap in the corner. She pulled the belt tight around the towelling robe she had on and looked at herself in the mirror. Her waterproof mascara had lived up to its name, but her eyeshadow and lipstick were smeared and her face looked pale against the almost black of her tangled and disarrayed curls. Whatever slight tan she might have picked up in the summer months seemed to have disappeared overnight. She walked across to the shower unit and put her hand on the tap. She held it there for a moment or two, the metal chill on her hand. And then she took it away again. She wouldn't shower that morning. She took the towelling robe off and carefully folded it, then picked up her clothing from the night before and dressed herself.

In 1903 Holloway Prison became a purely women-only facility. Coupled with the ending of transportation and the closing of Newgate, it meant a new prison for male offenders had to be built, a place to house those prisoners who were to be evicted to accommodate the fairer sex. The site chosen in the last, dying breaths of the Victorian era was a bit of undeveloped park and scrubland some two miles or so south of Hampstead Heath and a mile or so west of Delaney's new house in Belsize Park. Bayfield Prison was an all-categories facility that held up to six hundred prisoners. As the urban wealth of Hampstead and Belsize Park spread further out, the building was an incongruous intruder, a social blot on an increasingly upmarket landscape. But it lay hidden in its own ten acres of land, tall trees sheltering the place from view on the main road; it was still a lot closer, in many ways, to Kilburn than it was to Hampstead.

Sally pulled up at the iron gates that stood at the end of the long driveway and waited for the uniformed guard to check her identification. She wound her window down, flinching as the rain lashed at her face, and held her warrant card out. The guard grunted, monosyllabically, then waved her forward and signalled to the guard house. Electric motors whirred and the heavy iron gates swung open. Sally slipped the car in first gear and drove down through the gates and along the quarter-mile or so of private road that led up to the prison.

'What's Norrell got to say do you think, guv?'

Sally's question pulled Delaney out of his reverie. He had been thinking along the same lines. 'I've no idea.'

'You reckon he was involved in the petrol station hold-up?'

Delaney shook his head. 'Maybe, but who knows? If he was involved he'll have lived to regret it.'

Bayfield Prison, finished late in 1902, was three storeys high and had four wings on four sides, forming a central exercise area which could be monitored from observation posts on each corner. There were no windows on the exterior walls, which gave the brick building an imposing, severely functional look.

Sally pulled the car up to the parking area and they walked over to the visitors' entrance and, after the usual security checks, were shown through to a waiting area in the front of the prison. Delaney sat on an orange plastic chair bolted to a wall underneath a window, then stood up again and paced impatiently, looking out of the window and wishing he could fire up a cigarette. He kicked his shoe against the wall and looked at his watch. Ten past eight and way past time they should have seen Norrell.

He paced around the room for a minute more and had just decided to go and have a hard word with somebody when he heard the door open and looked across to see the warden walk in. Ron Cornwell was a tall man, six foot five but thin. He had pale blond hair and an apologetic smile on his face. 'Sorry, Inspector, I tried to get hold of you on your mobile earlier. And I've been held up on the telephone.'

Delaney walked over to him. 'What's going on?'

'You've had a wasted journey, I'm afraid.'

'What are you talking about?'

'Kevin Norrell was assaulted this morning. By some of his fellow prisoners. It was a very serious incident.'

'He's dead?'

The warden shook his head slightly. 'He's in intensive care in the South Hampstead up the road. He hasn't recovered consciousness.'

Sally joined Delaney. 'Comatose?'

The warden shrugged. 'Unconscious is all I know.'

'What's the prognosis?'

The warden spread his hands. 'I don't know; you'll have to talk to the hospital but it's probably too early to say.'

Delaney nodded. 'Who did it?'

'We're not exactly sure.'

Delaney glared at him. 'What the hell do you mean, you're not exactly sure?'

'All right, Inspector. Just calm it down, will you? Five men attacked him in the showers early this morning. He was knifed, hit his head badly. He lost a lot of blood.'

'Who were they?'

'We don't know who all of them were. Two of them got away.'

'How?' Delaney couldn't believe what he was hearing. 'This is supposed to be a secure prison for God's sake.'

'Three of the men were badly hurt by Norrell. Two of them are dead, the other is in intensive care.'

'And you've got no security footage?'

'The camera was taken out. That's why the two officers were dispatched. If they hadn't got there in time, Norrell would definitely be dead.'

'And they just let two of them walk away from it?'

'They were prioritised on dealing with the injured people.'

'Convenient.' Delaney couldn't keep the sarcasm from his voice.

'What exactly are you implying, Inspector?'

'What motivated the assault?'

'You know as well as I do, there could be any number of reasons. I have it on good authority that Norrell was involved in the manufacture and distribution of child pornography. Particularly nasty child pornography at that. You know what happens to people like that in prison if they're not in a segregated unit.'

'And why wasn't he in a segregated unit?'

'Because he wasn't charged with paedophile activities, Inspector, as you very well know. He was charged with murder and conspiracy to commit murder. He was a category-A prisoner and treated as such.'

'I want to talk to the guards who broke up the fight.'

'I'm afraid that won't be possible right away.'

'Why not? There's been a death, a serious assault. This is a police matter now.'

'And an investigation is under way. Your involvement will need to be officially sanctioned.' He shrugged, apologetically. 'At this moment it is out of both our hands.'

Delaney looked at him steadily. 'You know why I was due to speak to him?'

'I do. And I'm sorry.'

'Then you also know why I'm not going to just let this go?'

'Of course I do. And I want you to know that I will do everything in my power to help you, Inspector Delaney. Work with me on this.'

Delaney turned to Sally. 'Come on, Constable.'

'Sir.'

Delaney held the door open and turned back to the governor pointedly as Sally walked out. 'I'll be coming back. And in the meantime, you have my mobile number. You call me night or day you hear anything.'

'I am on your side, Inspector.'

Delaney held his gaze a moment longer and then left. The governor took off his glasses, running his hand over his brow, damp suddenly in the air-conditioned room.

Kate Walker shrugged out of her raincoat as she entered the suite of rooms and nodded distractedly to Lorraine Simons, her recently graduated assistant, who was still in the early days of training to become a forensic pathologist. She hung up the coat on an old wooden hatstand and walked past the trainee's desk, straight to her own office. She heard the young woman say something but had absolutely no idea what it was. She closed the door behind her, sat at her desk and, holding her head in her hands, cursed herself in a low whisper as she tried to put together a picture from the jigsaw pieces of memory from the night before.

She remembered travelling on the Tube, she remembered deciding to go to the Holly Bush rather than returning straight home, although now she wished to God she hadn't, she remembered having the first couple of Bloody Marys, and then she remembered chatting to the tall, handsome man in his late thirties, with dark curly hair and the kind of dark, come-to-bed eyes that were lately proving to be her undoing; but after that she had absolutely no memory whatsoever. It was a complete blank. She couldn't remember a damn thing from about eight thirty last night to waking up with a complete and total stranger in her bed at seven thirty that morning. And that wasn't something Kate Walker did. Ever.

She had shown the man, Paul Archer, out in the morning but had barely said ten words to him. Just hurried him out before closing the door on him, feeling the heat burn her face then as it was now as she shamefully tried to recall the previous night's events. Tried desperately hard, but failed absolutely.

The door to her office opened and Lorraine stuck her head round the corner. She was twenty-five, with strawberry-blonde hair, a body trim from cycling, a heart-shaped face, innocent eyes and the kind of optimism only found in the unworldly young or the terminally stupid.

'I was asking if you wanted any coffee, Dr Walker? I'm just about to make a trip to Starbucks.'

Kate found a smile from somewhere. 'Thanks, Lorraine, get us a hot chocolate and a croissant. And, please, it's Kate, not Dr Walker.'

Lorraine nodded. 'It's the weather for it. Don't know what happened to the summer.'

Kate smiled again, ironically. 'In our job you get to learn pretty fast that all things pass, Lorraine. All things end.'

Lorraine grimaced. 'Cheery thought.'

Kate flapped a dismissive hand at her. 'Go on, get the drinks.'

Lorraine closed the door behind her and as it did Kate's smile headed south faster than a penguin on a promise. She made a small fist of her right hand and put the nail of her thumb between her teeth. She deliberated for a second or two, then picked up the phone and rapidly tapped in some numbers. After a moment her call was answered. 'It's Kate,' she said quickly, needing to spill the words out. 'I think I've done something really stupid.'

She listened to the response, looking up at the ceiling. 'It's nothing like that. But I need to see you.' She looked through the glass window of her office to see Lorraine, bundled up against the cold, heading out the door and sighed. 'I need you to do some tests on me, Jane.'

'What kind of tests?' Jane Harrington's voice boomed, shocked, from the earpiece of her phone. Kate held it away from her ear then put it back and spoke into it, her voice a hoarse whisper. 'I think I might have been raped.'

South Hampstead Hospital was built, like many similar institutional buildings throughout the country, in the mid-Victorian era. In the year 1860 to be exact. It started life as a hospital for consumption and other diseases of the chest and much of the old Victorian architecture was still present, although new buildings had been attached over the years, most notably the teaching wing of the hospital which was inaugurated in 1904. The majority of the property was Grade II listed, now, which meant a lot of the offices and consulting rooms were poorly heated, relying on old, cast-iron radiators that the administration hadn't yet managed to justify the expense of replacing. What the rooms lost in terms of heat, however, was more than made up for in terms of ambience and in architectural charm.

Jane Harrington's office was a testament to clutter. The shelves lining her walls were jammed with books, with papers, with articles clipped from medical journals, with videos and DVDs and with a poorly tended ivy or two in inappropriate pots. Her equally cluttered desk sat beneath a bay window that looked out over a small quadrangle, at the far end of which stood the towered east wing of the original hospital. The windows were leaded lights, the desk was old oak and a visitor might be forgiven for imagining they were in the study of a don from one of the older colleges of Oxford or Cambridge.

Jane hung up her telephone, shocked at what she had heard. Kate Walker was more than just a dear friend, she was like a younger sister to her.

She drummed her fingers on her desk for a moment, then snatched up her telephone and pushed the button to connect with her administrative assistant. 'Adrian, it's Jane. Can you cancel my tutorials for this morning and rearrange as best you can? Thank you.'

She hung up again and looked out of the window at a group of nurses who were walking across the quad, their traditional black cloaks flapping in the wind like a storytelling of ravens. She always thought the collective noun rather odd. Less sinister, she supposed, than a murder of crows. The cloaks were originally coloured blue with the founding of the hospital, but with the death of Prince Albert they had been changed to black. Like the ties of Harrow schoolboys, the colour was originally only to last for a hundred years as a memorial to the German father of nine, but like the school, again, South Hampstead Hospital had stuck with it. Jane watched them thoughtfully as they walked out of sight, hurrying out of the persistent rain into the main part of the hospital. She came to a decision and picked up the telephone once more and punched in a number. 'I'd like to speak to Dr Caroline Akunin please.'

She waited for a moment while the call was put through. 'Caroline. It's Jane Harrington. Have you left for the frozen steppes yet or are you still on call as a police surgeon?' She listened and nodded tersely. 'Good, I need a favour.'

The sight of a man's penis would not normally have alarmed Valerie Manners. She was a nurse after all and nearing retirement. She had seen more examples of the male reproductive organ than most women of her generation, even including those who had lived through the free love era of the sixties and the wife-swapping fad of the seventies. This one, however, was attached to a raggedy man, and although not impressive, was unpleasantly semi-priapic and being wagged in her general direction as she cut though the lower part of South Hampstead Common on her way home after a late shift at the hospital. Caught off guard, she ran off the path and through some trees and bushes into open grassland, running uphill and not looking back. She ran for three and a half minutes and then stopped, realising that she wasn't being followed. Panting for breath she leaned against a tree and willed her wildly beating heart to calm down. She berated herself for a fool, flashers weren't rapists. They might develop into rapists but at the flasher stage of their development they were usually harmless. She knew that much from reading American crime novels. She put her panicking down to tiredness and being too wired after far too may cups of coffee to get her though the night shift. She was getting too old to work nights, she told herself. Her breathing slowed eventually and as she smoothed down her rumpled uniform, a bird fluttered noisily up through the branches of a tree nearby, startling her again. She looked across at the undergrowth beneath the tree and something caught her eye. She moved a little nearer, tentatively, and bent down to have a closer look. When she saw what it was, Valerie Manners, who had been a nurse for more years than she remembered, who had always despised those trainees who fainted or screamed at the sight of blood and injury, screamed, backed against the tree, all colour drained from her face, and fainted.

Sally Cartwright spun the wheel, kicking up loose bits of gravel, and parked her car next door to a brand-new Land Rover Discovery. She turned to Delaney. 'You got any coins, sir?'

Delaney looked across at her puzzled. 'What for?'

'The parking meter.'

Delaney shook his head in disbelief and opened her glovebox and pulled out an on police business sign, which he put on the dashboard.

'Anybody clamps this car, Constable, and they'll have their bollocks as Adam's apples.'

'Yes, sir.'

Sally smiled and opened the door, looking up at the neo-Gothic splendour of the grand entrance to the South Hampstead Hospital. Delaney followed her glance, taking in the familiar sight. One thing the Victorians were good at. Hospitals and cemeteries.

They walked in through the main reception and headed towards the intensive care unit, or ICU; just like the acronyms with the Met, Delaney had trouble keeping up. Why they couldn't just stick with what people knew and what made sense, was a puzzle beyond the capabilities of his detective brain. Too many middle managers in unnecessary jobs, he suspected.

Sally followed him as he walked up the long sweeping staircase at the end of the corridor. The floor was cool, tiled and clean, but the smell of the place was just as every bit unpleasant to Delaney as it always had been. Even as a kid he had hated the smell of hospitals, the particular ethyl odours hanging in the air like an anaesthetist's gas. As a child it had reminded him of boring hours at sick relatives' bedsides, and of operations he had had, once for a broken wrist and another when a kidney was removed. But as an adult the smell reminded him of just one thing: the death of his wife. He strode forward purposefully as he reached the top of the staircase and turned left to the intensive care unit. At least now, maybe, if Norris survived, he could learn something about why his wife had had to die four years ago on that cold station forecourt in Pinner Green. He could finally learn who did it. And, more importantly, with that knowledge he could visit retribution on those responsible. It wouldn't ease the guilt he still felt over her death, nothing would do that, but the need to root out and hurt the people who had cut short her life was as powerful in him as the need for his lungs to draw breath and his heart to pump blood.

Since his mid-teens Kevin Norrell had been a larger-than-life character. Now, however, as Delaney looked down at his massive frame he looked as harmless as a beached and rotting whale. He nodded at the armed and uniformed police officer who stood on guard outside the intensive care room and turned to the young doctor who was adjusting a drip that protruded, like a number of others, from the comatose Norrell's arm. 'What's the prognosis?'

The junior doctor shrugged. 'He lost a lot of blood from the stabbing. He had to be resuscitated on the way into hospital and again on the operating table.'

Sally looked down at the grotesque figure on the bed. 'What does that mean?'

Delaney answered. 'It means his brain was deprived of oxygen for a while, he could be brain-damaged.' He turned back to the young doctor. 'How bad is it?'

The junior doctor shrugged again. 'We'll wait and see. If he doesn't come round we'll do some more tests. Check his brain activity.'

'When will you know?'

'Check back later in the day.'

Delaney nodded. 'Can I see the other guy?'

'He's in surgery now. When he comes out you can see him. You won't be able to talk to him though, not for a while.'

Delaney and Sally walked back down the corridor, outside and across the car park to a small canteen that was run by volunteers to provide refreshment to the hospital visitors. It was a wooden A-frame and built like an alpine ski lodge, as incongruent in the rain-slashed English morning as a palm tree in Piccadilly.

Sally went inside while Delaney held back, taking advantage of a lull in the rain to spark up a cigarette. He drew deep on it, ignoring the disapproving glances from passers-by as he let out a stream of smoke. He felt conflicted. Ordinarily, seeing Norrell in intensive care would have brightened his mood. But the steroid-enhanced, bonehead muscle for hire had information stored somewhere within his Neolithic brain that Delaney needed. The thought that the man might die was almost too much for him to bear. Not when he was this close, not after so long.

He ground his cigarette under heel and went inside to join Sally who had brought a couple of teas over to a small table by the window. Inside the cafe was more like a scout hut, or the village hall from Dad's Army. Delaney sat down half expecting to see 'Dig for Victory' posters on the wall or 'Eat less Bread'. He took a sip of his tea, scowled and poured some sugar into it from a glass dispenser.

Sally looked at him for a moment. 'Do you want to talk about it?'

'Talk about what?'

'What happened that night?'

'No.'

Sally didn't answer him for a second. 'We were due to interview Norrell this morning, right?'

'Operative word being due.'

'In connection with the murder of your wife?'

'That's right.'

Sally seemed to steel herself. 'Well, the last time I looked, and with all due respect, sir, I'm a police detective. Not a waitress. Not a chauffeur. Not a dogsbody.'

Delaney waved a hand, a little amused by her angry tone. 'And the point would be?'

'That this is a police investigation, as you told the governor. And as far as I know I'm on your team, aren't I?'

Delaney looked at her for a moment then sighed. 'I'm sure you know it all anyway.'

'Go on.'

'About four years ago. I was off duty. I stopped to fill up in a petrol station when it was being raided. They were armed with shotguns. My wife was in the car with me.'

'What happened?'

'One of them fired his sawn-off, shattering the plate window. I jumped in the car and attempted to follow them. They shot back at us. Disabling the car. Killing my wife.'

'I'm sorry.'

Delaney nodded. 'As I said, you've heard it all before. We were never able to trace the van, we never found out the identity of the raiders. It was a closed book. A cold case. And then Norrell started talking about it.'

'You think he was genuine? You really think he knew something?'

Delaney shrugged his shoulders. 'I hope so. I hope he lives long enough for us to find out.'

He looked out of the window; the wind had picked up again and with it the rain. Fat beads of water were splashing repeatedly and loudly against the glass of the window, running quickly down the pane now. Delaney turned back to Sally Cartwright.

'I'm going outside for another smoke.'

Kate walked across the quadrangle. Her head was angled down, her eyes squinting against the rain. She looked at her shoes, getting more spattered and besmirched by the minute, but she barely registered the fact. Still numb, her mind still reeling, she walked in a daze, not noticing her friend waving to her through the window of her office or the man at the far end of the quadrangle who was watching her.

She crossed the quad and walked into the entrance, shaking her hair as she hurried up the stone steps to the first floor. Jane Harrington ushered her into her office, making sympathetic noises about being wet through and helping her out of her coat as she shut the door behind her. 'Sit down, Kate. I'll make some tea. Are you hungry? Can I get you anything?'

Kate shook her head. 'Just tea would be great.' She smiled gratefully, pleased that her friend was letting her take her time and hadn't demanded to know what had happened straight away. If she could have answered that question she wouldn't be here in the first place. Jane had been her friend for many years. In her forties she was older than her and wiser than most. She had been pestering her for years to join her in private practice at the teaching hospital and clinic attached to the university, but Kate had always had different ambitions, a different agenda. Now, as she sat cocooned in an armchair behind mullioned windows, she was not sure she had made the right choices. But what she did know was that she didn't know anyone she would rather turn to if she ever needed help. And if she ever needed help, it was certainly now.

A short while later Jane handed her a mug of strong, sweet tea and sat opposite her.

'Ready to talk about it?'

'I don't know what happened, Jane.' Her voice was strained, she felt on the verge of tears.

'Then tell me what you do know.'

'I was at the Holly Bush. Taking a swim in a bottle of vodka.'

'That's not like you.'

'I met Jack yesterday.'

Jane nodded understanding. 'It didn't go well?'

Kate shook her head. 'I decided to drown my sorrows. Bad enough to get dumped by the man. Now I'm turning into him.'

Jane smiled sympathetically. 'Go on.'

'I got chatting to a man at the bar. He'd started talking to me. I didn't think he was trying to pick me up.'

Jane Harrington frowned.

'Yeah, I know, you don't have to say it. His name is Archer. He's a doctor so I thought I could trust him for goodness' sake.'

Jane reacted at the name. 'Paul Archer?'

Kate looked up, surprised. 'Do you know him?'

Jane jerked her thumb at the window. 'He works here. He's a paediatrician.'

'What do you know about him?'

'I know he has a reputation.'

'Reputation for what?'

'As a ladies' man. He's married but it doesn't stop him apparently.'

Kate put her head in her hands. 'Shit.'

'Or didn't stop him, I should say. His wife's divorcing him.'

'What am I going to do, Jane?'

'Tell me exactly what happened.'

Kate stood up angrily. 'That's just it, I don't know what happened. I don't remember leaving the pub, I don't remember going home. I remember being in the pub, listening to Madeleine Peyroux, drinking Bloody Marys, talking to Paul Archer and the next thing I remember is waking up in my bed at seven thirty this morning, bare as a jaybird with a stark bollock naked man lying beside me.'

'Dr Archer?'

'Yes, Dr bloody Archer.' She sat down again and looked at her friend with sore, bloodshot and devastated eyes. 'I think he raped me, Jane. I think he slipped some Rohypnol, or something like it, in my drink and he raped me.'

Jane took her friend's hand and held it as tears ran down her cheek. 'It's going to be okay, Kate. We're going to find out what happened and if he has done what you say, then we are going to make him pay for it.'

'But if I can't remember…?'

'The first thing we are going to do is take a blood test. See if there is anything in your system.'

'And then what?'

'I've asked Dr Caroline Akunin to come over here.'

Kate looked up agitated. 'No, Jane. I don't want that.'

'You haven't showered, have you?'

Kate shook her head.

'So you must have had it in mind.'

'I don't want to go to the police. I can't.'

'That's why I asked her to come here.'

Kate held her head in her hands again. 'I've performed the procedures often enough in the past. Feeling sorry for the women. Pitying them. Christ, Jane, I never thought I'd be in their shoes.'

Jane took her hand again. 'You're not at fault here, Kate.'

'Aren't I? I went out and got smashed. Maybe I did want to act like Jack. Wash my problems away in a lake of alcohol, have meaningless, emotionless sex.'

Jane shook her head. 'Are you saying this is what you wanted?'

'If it's what I wanted, I would have remembered, wouldn't I?'

Dr Caroline Akunin was a stunningly beautiful, black woman in her late thirties. She was tall, elegant, shaved her hair and was seven months pregnant. She looked sympathetically at Kate as Jane Harrington closed the door behind her office, leaving the two women alone.

Kate nodded at the doctor's swollen belly. 'Nearly due then?'

Caroline ran her hand instinctively across her bump. 'How can you tell? A couple of months to go.'

'And how's your gorgeous husband?'

'My gorgeous husband is being a pain in the butt right now.'

'Why?'

'He wants this little one to be born back in his own country.'

'Russia?'

'Yup. Moscow, just where I want to be in the middle of winter.'

'Will you go?'

Caroline smiled, the brilliance of it lighting the room. 'I don't mind really. Quite looking forward to it. Never let him know though. You have to keep your man on his toes, don't you?'

Kate looked away. 'I guess.'

'I'm sorry, Kate.'

Kate put her hand on her arm. 'That's okay. Let's just get on with this.'

Caroline nodded sympathetically. 'We should really do this back at the station.'

'White City?'

'Yes.'

'You can't be serious?'

'Any evidence I collect here won't be admissible in court, you do know that?'

'I know, Caroline. But I can't go there. Not with this.'

'You wouldn't be the first.'

'I just want to know what happened. After that…' Kate shrugged. She had absolutely no idea what she would do if her fears were confirmed.

Dr Akunin opened up her medical bag, took out some plastic bags and a pair of latex gloves. She pulled the gloves on, snapping the latex tight to her fingers. 'You'd better get undressed then.'

PC Bob Wilkinson scowled as he looked down at the body that lay barely hidden in the undergrowth. He sighed, unclipped his police radio from its holster and he shared a look with his colleague, a young, black constable called Danny Vine. The boy was ashen, he looked down at what lay on the ground and then dashed off to the bushes to be violently sick.

'Foxtrot Alpha from thirty-two.'

His police radio crackled. 'Go ahead, Bob.'

Wilkinson looked over at his colleague who had stood up and was now wiping the blue serge of his uniformed arm across his mouth. He felt sorry for him, you never got used to it, though, even after nearly thirty years. 'We have an IC1 female. Somewhere in her twenties.' He paused. 'It's not an accidental death.'

Kate stood in the centre of the white cotton sheet that Caroline had spread on the floor. The doctor was on her knees in front of Kate with a comb in her hand. Kate looked away as she worked, carefully placing the combed hairs in a small, clear plastic bag.

'When was the last time you had consensual sex, Kate?'

Her memory flashed back to around three weeks ago. She had no trouble recalling that.

Jack Delaney.

'Tell me, Jack. Talk to me.' Low, breathless, husky.

'Dig your nails in. I want to taste blood.'

'Pleasure and pain, Detective Inspector. Very Catholic.'

Delaney laughed, looking into her eyes, at the mischief sparking within them. 'I want to remember the moment.'

And Kate dug her nails into his buttocks, pulling him deeper into her. 'Oh, you'll remember. I'll make sure of that.'

She remembered the savagery of their lovemaking. Remembered him on top of her, penetrating her almost painfully, his powerful arms clutching her tight to his muscular body like a life raft as he rode the waves of their passion. She remembered his soft eyes wet with emotion as he shuddered to a climax, taking her with him. She remembered the absolute nakedness of his emotions as he held on too long afterwards, kissing her salty shoulder and whispering her name like a prayer.

And she remembered the love she felt for him.

She looked over at the curtained window and felt tears running down her cheeks again.

Caroline Akunin looked up at her. Misunderstanding her tears. 'I'm sorry. I have to ask.'

'That's okay, Caroline. It was three weeks ago.'

Caroline nodded. 'I am going to take some swabs, is that okay?'

Kate nodded. Her body was already feeling like it was something apart from her once more. Distancing herself from her feelings, something she had learned at a young age. Something she had lived with for years until Delaney had made her feel connected with her body again. Now she felt violated and ashamed and wretched. But most of all, she felt angry.

A buzzing sound then a sharp ring. Kate looked across at her mobile phone that was vibrating on Jane Harrington's desk. 'You better pass that to me, Caroline. I told the office to call me only if it was really urgent.'

Delaney looked at the bloodshot eyes of Martin Quigley. Eyes that darted nervously back and forth. Eyes that squirmed under his scrutiny with pain and with fear. His right arm was suspended in a sling and covered with plaster. His fingers, that were visible, flexed nervously. His lower jaw was covered with wire and metal and held immobile. He grunted through the metal but quite clearly couldn't speak. He was a large man, somewhere in his forties. His nose had been broken many times in the past, and the home-made tattoos on his neck would quickly dispel any lingering suspicions that this man was employed in white-collar work.

Delaney didn't know the man, but he knew the type. Bruisers who communicated with their knuckles. Strong-arm men for cleverer criminals. A foot soldier, cannon fodder, a gorilla just like Kevin Norrell. He moved around the side of the bed, closer to him. 'You attacked Kevin Norrell, and I want to know why.' The man grunted again, an animal in pain. Delaney couldn't make out what he was saying.

Sally Cartwright took out a pad and a pen and held it out to Quigley's good hand. He flicked his broken-veined eyeballs to the left, where she stood, then back at Delaney and grunted again, but made no move to take the pen or notebook.

Delaney smiled at him. 'You taking what our American cousins would call the fifth, Quigley?'

Quigley glared at him with defiance in his eyes and didn't move.

Delaney glanced over at Sally. 'Give him the pen, Sally.'

Sally put the pen in his left hand but he made no move to hold it. Delaney reached over, put his own hand over Quigley's broken one and pulled it. Quigley grunted, loudly, his face red with pain and tears starting in his eyes. Delaney released his grip. 'He'll take the pen now.'

This time Quigley held the pen. Sally put her notebook under it so that he could write.

'Why'd you attack him, Quigley?'

Quigley wrote one word. The scrawl was nearly undecipherable but Sally could just make it out. 'He's written "Nonce", sir.'

Delaney looked at Quigley. 'You saying you attacked Norrell because he was a paedophile?'

Quigley grunted an affirmative.

'Who put you up to it?'

Quigley grunted again and wrote some more. Sally read it out again. 'He says no one.'

'Just doing your civic duty, were you?'

Quigley grunted again, trying to keep his head as still as possible. Sally looked over at her boss. 'Do you believe him?'

'I don't know.' Delaney smiled at her then tugged on Quigley's hand again. Quigley's breath hissed through the metal mask of his teeth and he gurgled in pain. Delaney let go of his hand. 'You telling me the truth, Martin?'

Quigley's eyes pleaded with Delaney, his gurgling incoherent but comprehensible as Delaney reached towards his plastered arm once more.

Quigley pleaded with his eyes as Delaney's mobile phone rang. He grabbed it out of his jacket pocket and flipped it open.

'Delaney.'

'Jack, it's Diane.'

'I'm at the South Hampstead, interviewing someone.'

'It'll have to wait. I heard about Norrell and I'm sorry, but something's come up.'

'What?'

'We've got a dead body in the woods, South Hampstead Common. A young female.'

'We know who she is?'

'Not a damn thing. Uniform are securing the site, but given the weather we want it processed as soon as possible. Paddington Green should be handling it but they've got some big anti-terrorist initiative tying up their manpower.'

'Lucky us.'

Delaney looked across at the rain-speckled window and through it at the grey clouds overhead. 'Give me the details.' Delaney listened for a moment or two then closed his phone. He put his mobile back in his pocket and gestured to Sally. 'We're out of here.'

The sigh of relief from Quigley was audible. Delaney turned back to him. 'I'll talk to you later. Meanwhile, you better pray Norrell makes it. Because if he doesn't I'm going to come back here and finish the job he started. And I'm a professional.'

Quigley glared at his back as they left his field of vision then closed his eyes nervously, snaked a tongue around his dry lips and swallowed with evident pain.

Kate Walker flicked the end of her long, multi-coloured scarf over one shoulder and walked quickly across the quadrangle and around the corner, passing the main entrance to the South Hampstead Hospital as she started for the car park. Her head was down and although the rain, for the moment at least, had stopped, the north-east wind still had a chill edge to it. She fumbled in her pocket for her keys when a voice called out to her.

'Kate.'

She looked round, her heart thudding in her chest, to see Paul Archer.

He smiled at her, his voice friendly. 'Kate, what are you doing here? Were you looking for me?'

Kate couldn't speak, she couldn't breathe, she leaned back against her car, fighting to control the panic.

Archer smiled at her. 'Is everything all right?'

She found her voice. 'Get away from me.'

Archer looked puzzled. 'What are you talking about?'

'I know what you did. So just stay away from me.'

'I've got no idea what you're talking about. I haven't done anything.'

'Last night…'

'Last night was your idea. You invited me back to your place, remember.'

Kate shook her head angrily. 'You're not going to get away with this.'

'Get away with what? I didn't do anything.'

'You're lying.'

'Nothing happened, Kate. We both got drunk, you suggested I stay over. We slept together, but nothing happened, if that's what you're worried about.'

Kate desperately wanted to believe him, but knew that something was wrong, something was definitely wrong. She knew her own body, didn't she? 'Then why can't I remember?'

Archer smiled at her, genuinely amused. 'You were absolutely paralytic, Kate. It's not unusual.'

Kate stepped closer to him, she wanted to knock the arrogant smirk off his cocky face. She wanted to hurt him, really hurt him. 'You're not going to get away with it, you sick pervert!' Archer grabbed both of her arms and she struggled furiously but his grip was like a vice. She looked up at him with livid eyes, her face contorted in fury. 'Let me go now, or I swear you will regret it!'

He pushed her away, the thin veneer of urbanity stripped from his face now as he sneered, 'What makes you think I'd want something like you?'

Kate slapped him hard across his face and went to slap him again but he caught her hand. 'Let go of my hand!' she yelled at him, red-faced with fury.

'You heard the lady.'

Archer released his grip on her and turned round to see a man looking at him impassively, scant inches away, a young woman standing behind him. The man was easily Archer's height, but had a few years on him and Archer was in far better physical shape. He poked the stranger in the chest. 'Back off, sunshine, and take your little friend with you. This is none of your business.'

Delaney punched him in the face. A hard straight punch to the bridge of his nose. So fast Archer didn't even see it coming. He gasped out in pain and dropped to his knees, completely taken aback. 'You've broken my fucking nose.' Blood was spilling from his nose on to his hands.

Delaney turned back round to speak to Kate but she was already striding towards her car, her scarf of many colours flapping behind her long, curly hair like a sexy Doctor Who. Roy, from the burger van, would have approved, Delaney reckoned. He walked up to her as Kate got in her car, slammed the door shut and kicked over the engine.

'Kate!'

But she was gone, her wheels spinning, throwing up gravel like tiny shrapnel as she accelerated to the exit.

Archer was still whimpering, incredulous. 'You broke my fucking nose.'

Delaney ignored him, 'Come on, Sally.' He walked across the car park to their car.

DC Cartwright looked down at Archer who was staring at the blood on his hands in shock and utter disbelief. 'I'd get a plaster for that if I were you. They should have one in there.'

She jerked her thumb towards the hospital entrance and walked after Delaney.

Sally Cartwright adjusted the rear-view mirror watching the man Delaney had decked as he hobbled, clearly in pain, to the hospital entrance, a bloody handkerchief held to his nose. She turned the ignition key and looked across at Delaney, a slight frown creasing her neatly shaped eyebrows. 'Seat belt, sir.'

Delaney rolled his eyes and pulled his seat belt across, snapping it into place. 'Just drive, will you, Constable?'

'Sir.'

She slipped the clutch out and pulled the car smoothly out of the exit; no gravel flew behind them as she indicated left and headed towards the south part of Hampstead Heath.

After driving in silence for a couple of minutes she flicked a glance at her boss. 'What was all that about, do you reckon, sir?'

'I have absolutely no idea, Sally.'

'She seemed pretty upset.'

'Yup.'

'Do you think he'll make a complaint against you?'

'He doesn't know who I am.' Delaney shrugged and went back to staring out the window. Sally raised an eyebrow again and concentrated on the road ahead.

When he was sure the detective constable wasn't looking, Delaney rubbed his left hand over his right knuckles and winced. He had no idea what was going on with the man he had punched, or what he had to do with Kate. He had probably broken the man's nose who, after all, was right, it had been none of his business. It had felt good though, for all the wrong reasons. It had been a morning of frustrations, getting so close to discovering the identity of his wife's killers, only to be thwarted at the final hurdle. And he wasn't so unaware as to not realise he still had issues with Kate Walker. He had punched the man half out of anger, half out of a desire to impress her. He had told Kate that he didn't have room in his life for her, and it was true. He had too many unresolved matters to set straight. But if he had no room in his life for her, then why was there such a great hole in it?

Kate Walker's hands were still shaking as she slipped the gear into fourth and stepped on the accelerator pedal. Shaking, she realised, with shock and anger. Of all the people in the world she didn't want knowing about last night and what had happened to her, it was Jack Delaney. What on earth was the man doing there, for God's sake? It was bad enough that he had humiliated her yesterday, broke her heart and made her so depressed that she went to chase her blues away with vodka. If it hadn't been for him she would never have gone to the Holly Bush, would never have let a complete stranger chat her up at the bar. She wasn't a student, she wasn't a silly young girl who didn't know any better and didn't realise the dangers. In fact, she knew the dangers better than most, but had still let the man under her guard. Just like she had let Delaney under her guard, and look what had happened there. And, of course, he just had to be there when she confronted Paul Archer, making a fool of herself. She slammed the palm of her hand down hard on her horn, the hooter blaring out loudly and causing the cyclist she was overtaking to wobble dangerously to the side of the road.

She fought to calm her anger, steady the adrenalin coursing through her veins. But the truth was she was getting angrier by the minute. She had seen it in Paul Archer's eyes. He was amused. He was mocking her. There was a cold chill in those eyes. He had raped her. She absolutely believed it now. Believed it with a cold certainty in the heart of her soul. But she had absolutely no idea what she was going to do about it.

Paul Archer held a water-soaked handkerchief to his throbbing nose and wiped away the last vestiges of blood. The pain was like a thin spike driven into his forehead. He looked at his face in the mirror and turned left and right to look at each profile. As far as he could tell, and he was pretty qualified to tell, his nose wasn't broken. He put his hands under the cold water, watching as the deep red blood became thinner and paler as it swirled away. He scooped some of the cold water into the palm of his hand and held it against his forehead for a moment or two, waiting for the pain to ease.

Stepping away he snatched a paper towel and rubbed his hands dry as he walked across to the window, fumbling open a pack of Demerol and swallowing a couple. He looked out at the car park below and beyond. Puddles of rainwater, like irregular-shaped, murky mirrors, reflected the dark clouds, scudding in the skies above. There was nothing reflected in Paul Archer's eyes though. They stared ahead with a blank, cold certainty.

When he was nine years old, a couple of older boys at school, brothers, had bullied him. Making him drop his packed lunch of cheese and piccalilli sandwiches on to the rain-soaked tarmac of the playground. Kids didn't like other kids who were different and these two reckoned Paul Archer fancied himself as better than them because he didn't have to eat school lunches. As Paul watched his sandwiches soak up the muddy rain he didn't fight back, he didn't say a word, just picked up his Tupperware box and walked away, not even hearing the laughs and insults that were shouted after him. Paul was too intent listening to the cool voice of reason inside his head. The one that said no slight should go unpunished. And if he wasn't big enough or strong enough or old enough to make them suffer then he would hurt the thing they loved. He waited three weeks and then very early one Saturday morning he climbed over the fence of their back garden, rolled a lawn-mower against the door of the kennel where their pet dog, a Staffordshire bull terrier, slept, poured petrol he had taken from his dad's shed all over it and set it alight.

The adult Paul Archer held a hand to his throbbing nose again; there were many things he knew now that he hadn't as a child, but one thing that hadn't changed was that certain knowledge of the joy of retribution. He knew it as surely as night follows day. As death follows life. As pleasure follows pain.

Someone was going to pay.

In the front part of the head, in the roof of each nostril, lies a group of mucous-covered sacs. The olfactory epithelium. About five square centimetres in size and containing about ten million receptor cells. Using these receptors the human nose can differentiate, it has been claimed, between four thousand and ten thousand different odours. Odour is at the very genesis and denouement of human existence. A smell receptor has been identified in human sperm – the sperm literally smells its way to the egg. And death, as any policeman or mortician knows, is certainly no friend of the olfactory organ. However, the unmistakable smell of a deceased and decaying body had had no time to develop that morning and PC Bob Wilkinson reckoned his young colleague was as glad of that fact as anyone.

PC Danny Vine had already thrown up twice within the space of half an hour and Wilkinson, taking pity on him, had sent him to the front of the path to prevent anyone from disturbing the crime scene. Move along please. Nothing to see here. Only, of course, there was. There was plenty to see. But none of it pleasant.

The mechanics of investigation had already been set in motion. A large section of the surrounding area had been cordoned off with yellow tape stretching from tree to tree in a rough diamond shape, covering about a quarter of an acre. The yellow tape with 'police do not cross' written upon it, the yellow tape that unfailingly attracted the prurient attention of the scandal-hungry public, just as the scent of another dog's waste always attracted canine interest. The sort of thrill-seeking interest the public had in other people's misfortune and pain, feeding off it like some kind of sick parasites. Road crash syndrome.

Police vans had been parked outside the cordoned area and uniformed police and white-suited scene-of-crime officers, SOCOs, went about containing the integrity of the site. Aluminium telescopic poles had been snapped open and joined together to form a skeletal framework which was positioned over the area immediately surrounding the body. Plastic sheets had been run over the frame so that the structure took on the appearance of a wedding marquee. Only within the frame, there was no cheery fiddle music, there was no three-tiered cake on a stand, no punchbowl, no laughing guests, no nervous best man and certainly no blushing bride with a blue garter on her stocking and a hungry husband by her side. Inside was the dead body of a woman in her mid-twenties, with black hair, black lipstick and black blood crusting the edges of the deep slash wounds to her chest, throat and abdomen.

Delaney and Sally Cartwright nodded at PC Danny Vine as they ducked under the tape and headed towards the murder scene. Danny responded with a half-hearted smile.

'You all right, Danny?' Sally asked.

The constable nodded again, unconvincingly. 'Something I ate.'

'You still on for tonight?'

The constable smiled again, more warmly this time. 'Yeah, I'll be there. Bells on.'

Sally flashed him a quick smile and hurried to join Delaney.

'Something I should know about?' he asked.

'Sir?'

'Poster boy back there. You and he sharing handcuffs?'

Sally coloured lightly but laughed out loud. 'A few of us are meeting up for drinks, that's all.'

Delaney nodded, not entirely convinced. 'Right.'

'You're welcome to join us.'

Delaney nodded again. 'If you say so.'

'Anyway. It wouldn't be a crime, would it?'

'Not in my world.' Delaney's brief moment of good humour curled up and died as he walked forward and saw the dark-haired woman standing outside the scene-of-crime tent.

'Dr Walker. Nice scarf.'

Kate turned and looked at him, and cursed inwardly, as she took her scarf off and pulled the protective coverings over the work boots she had changed into. She should have known Delaney would turn up. He was, after all, less than a mile away, just like her, when the call had come in.

'Inspector.' She was surprised at how calm her voice sounded, how cool.

'Have you got anything for us?'

'Like you I've only just arrived. From what I've seen from here, a young woman, I'm guessing mid-twenties.'

'No ID?'

PC Wilkinson stepped forward. 'Nothing yet, sir. We're going to finger-search the area but there was nothing on her person. She had a handbag but it was empty apart from some condoms and a tube of KY jelly.'

'Nothing else?'

'She had a Tube ticket.'

Delaney nodded. South Hampstead Tube station was a stone's throw from the edge of that part of the heath.

'Who found her?'

Wilkinson nodded over to the path where the nurse, Valerie Manners, stood, sipping shakily from a cup of tea as a female PC talked to her.

'I'll want to speak to her next. Make sure she stays here, Bob.'

'Boss.'

Delaney moved to the entrance of the tent. 'Let's have a look.'

Kate Walker followed him in. The small space was already bustling. SOCO had cleared the overhanging undergrowth, carefully cutting away the branches and shrubbery that had partially hidden the body. A video-camera operator was filming the scene, while a photographer, blond-haired and in his twenties, was doing the same. The bright flashes poked needles in Delaney's sore eyes.

Kate looked down at the woman. She had black boots on her feet, calf-length and high-heeled, black leggings, a short black, leather skirt with an ornate, silver buckled belt. She was naked from the waist up. Her long hair was dyed deep black, and she was wearing black eyeshadow and lipstick. A goth. Kate felt the irony of it. A subculture that had death as part of its make-up, no pun intended. She would have laughed if it wasn't so pitifully sad. The woman was beautiful, in a painted-doll kind of way, with a full, voluptuous figure. Kate had to blink tears away as she looked at what had been done to her.

A bruise ran along the lower part of the dead woman's jaw on the right side of the face. The purple mottling even more obscene against the deathly white of her skin.

On the opposite side her neck had been slashed from ear to the larynx. Below her neck, a knife had opened up a circular hole, ripping down and exposing the bones of her spinal column. The large blood vessels on either side of the neck had been slashed, and blood had run down her semi-naked body in jagged sheets. The heart had been pumping when the wounds were made, spraying the blood outward with considerable pressure and telling her that the cuts had been made pre-mortem.

Kate turned to Delaney who was standing beside her and, thankfully, holding his counsel for once. 'Whoever did it, I'd guess, used a large, relatively sharp blade, wielded with great force. He was full of rage, out of control I'd say. There are no defence wounds on her hands or arms so I would surmise the woman may have known her attacker.'

'Was she killed here?'

Kate nodded. 'Going by the arterial spray on the ground and undergrowth around her.'

She looked down at the young woman's body again. Was she right? Had she known the man who had done this to her? Or was it a random attack? Kate's gaze ran across the woman's mutilated body, past the slashes on her neck and down to her lower abdomen where a jagged cut ran across it. As if the man had held the knife down in a grip and had sawed through, like a huntsman gutting a deer. That could have been her, she realised, last night. Drugged, raped, she could have been mutilated too and dumped in the woods. Suddenly, the pinpricks in her eyes started in earnest and she could no longer hold back the tears. She felt her stomach lurch and knew she had to get out of there. She turned, pushed past Delaney, and ran through the opening of the tent. Ducking under the tape cordon she staggered into a wooded area away from the shocked looks of the police, fell to her knees and threw up. She bent her head low, holding her long dark hair away from her face, and threw up again. She put one hand on the wet ground to balance herself, weak with despair, and retched again painfully. She gulped in some ragged breaths of air, her throat cramping, and ran her hand over her forehead, now damp with perspiration. Her voice was a rough whisper as she swore through her panted breath.

It wasn't the Hippocratic oath.

Back in the scene-of-crime tent Delaney turned to Sally Cartwright. She had offered to go after the doctor but had been told her to stay where she was. 'I guess a lot of people ate something dodgy this morning,' Delaney had said.

Sally looked down at the dead goth's mutilated body and felt queasy herself. 'I can't say I blame her.'

But Delaney was puzzled. Kate Walker was a consummate professional, had seen more dead bodies than even he had. Something was clearly up with her and he couldn't help wondering if it had something to do with the confrontation he had witnessed in the car park of the South Hampstead Hospital just a short while ago.

Kate Walker stood up. She took the bottle of Evian water she always kept in her handbag and took a swallow, rinsing the water around her mouth a few times and then spitting it out. She did it once more and then took a long swallow of the cold water. She poured a little more on a handkerchief and wiped her brow and lips and took a couple of deep breaths, willing her heart to slow down. She placed a hand against the damp bark of a tree and forced herself to breathe evenly.

Since an early age ambition had been Kate Walker's middle name. At school she had come top of her year seven years running. Unlike many of her peers she hadn't been distracted by boys or music or become fanatical about sports, she wasn't obsessive about ponies and didn't have a crush on her French teacher, she didn't spend hours shopping for outfits, had no fascination with shoes or handbags or jewellery or make-up, she didn't take an interest in anything, in fact, that wasn't going to further her academic career. As a young girl in prep school she hadn't been like that, she was a bit of a tomboy. She was as interested in climbing trees or playing cricket as any of her boy cousins. Her favourite novel was Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons and a day cooped up inside on a fine summer's day was torture to her. All that had changed, however, one summer when she was eleven years old and her outer life became driven inward. It was a solemn-faced and earnest girl who went to St Angela's for Girls, keeping her dark thoughts behind her dark lashes. If the eyes were the window to the soul, Kate Walker's were tinted glass. St Angela's was for the wealthy and gifted children of the south London suburbs whose parents couldn't bear to send their daughters further south to Redean or west to St Helen's. Kate's studies became her life, and she quite literally lost herself in books. She might not have lost her love for Arthur Ransome but the adventures took place in her imagination now. As a fresher at university she ignored all entreaties to join societies that were about fun and not study. Most people went to university to play hard and work hard, a few went to party. Kate went to work hard and that was it. She got a first and went on to become an exemplary medical student. As a qualified doctor she wasn't content with the prospect of general practice. She took courses and the extra work as a police surgeon. It was while doing that, and working closely with the police, that she became fascinated with forensic anthropological science and the work of pathologists. One dealt with bones, the other with soft tissue. She had gone back to medical school, qualified and became a forensic pathologist. Overall it had taken over twelve years and it was all she ever wanted. And she was good at it, already targeted for the head of her department and beyond. Her future was as plotted out for her and as detailed as an Ordnance Survey map.

Today, though, as she looked across at the blue lights that were flashing through the trees and undergrowth ahead like a carnival for lost souls, she put a hand on her sore stomach, aching with the cramps of throwing up, and thought about the ravaged body of a woman just starting out in life, an unfinished symphony cut tragically short, about the horrible waste and the madness of it all, and she realised suddenly that she was sick of being a pathologist. She was sick of the blood and the pain and the daily reminder of the absolute evil that mankind was capable of. She was sick of dealing with the hard-headed cynicism of people like Jack Delaney and his ilk. Sick of death, in fact.

Sick to her stomach.

As she walked back to the crime scene she realised she had already come to a decision. She was going to phone Jane Harrington to see if the general practice position in her clinic attached to the hospital was still available. She had been offered the post a few weeks before and this time she would take her friend up on the offer. She'd have her resignation in to her boss by the end of the day. She had one last case to deal with first, though. She didn't know who the young girl in the woods was. She didn't know how she had died. But she would give her all finding out how and why she had died. She gave the unknown woman her oath on that much.

A blood oath.

Delaney tried to look sympathetic as the nurse, Valerie Manners, recounted the morning's events. 'I'm sure it was all very traumatic for you.'

'Traumatic isn't the word. I'm used to traumatic. You work enough shifts on the accident and emergency unit at a large hospital and you get used to trauma.'

Bob Wilkinson spoke out. 'What would you call it then?'

Delaney threw a 'leave it out' look to the constable who was standing by Sally as she took notes.

Valerie Manners was a bit taken aback by the question and had to think a little, giving up after a few moments of struggle. 'Well, very traumatic I would say.'

Delaney nodded, again with sympathy. The trouble all too often with the public when they were caught up in a crime, was to make too much of everything. The answers to solving a crime were all too often in the everyday, mundane, prosaic details, not in the dramatic and the astounding. Many of the witnesses he had interviewed over the years had a tendency to vicariously sensationalise their own drab lives by way of someone else's tragedy. Memories became embellished with imagined detail. But Delaney was a seasoned enough copper to know how to winnow the wheat from the chaff. At least he hoped he was. 'Go back to the beginning, Mrs Manners.'

'It's Ms Manners.'

'Back to the beginning then please, Ms Manners.'

'I had stopped to catch my breath, leant on the tree over there-'

Delaney interrupted her. 'Before then?'

'When I saw the flasher?'

'Before that.'

'Back to leaving hospital?'

'Yes.'

The nurse looked at him perplexed, like he was an idiot. 'Is it relevant?'

Delaney sighed and looked at her, any sympathy he had for her draining fast. 'I'll tell you what, Ms Manners, let's make a deal. I won't tell you how to dress a wound or change a bedpan, and you let me decide what details are important or not in a particularly brutal murder case.'

'All right, no need to get snitty. I can get that kind of attitude any day of the week, if I want it, from the consultants who think they're better than good God Himself.'

Delaney ignored her. 'What time did you leave work this morning?'

'I left the hospital about eight o'clock.'

'And you always cut through this part of the heath?'

'Yes. It takes me about fifteen minutes to walk home. And a bit of fresh air never hurt anyone. I've learned that much in my job.'

Tell that to the woman in the scene of crime tent, thought Delaney, but didn't say it. 'And you didn't see anything out of the ordinary?'

'I saw a man wagging his penis at me! I'd count that as a pretty unusual event, wouldn't you?'

'Can you describe it?'

'The penis, or the event?'

Delaney sighed and Sally Cartwright and Bob Wilkinson had to try hard not to smile. 'Just tell us what happened?'

'I was walking on to the heath-'

Delaney interrupted her. 'You hadn't seen anybody earlier, somebody coming off the heath perhaps?'

The woman shook her head. 'Not a single soul. Weather like this tends to keep people at home or in their cars, doesn't it?'

Sally looked up from her notebook. 'And the man who exposed himself to you…?'

'He was in his late twenties I'd say, maybe thirties. Semi-priapic.'

'I'm sorry?' Sally asked.

Wilkinson smiled. 'He had a hard-on, Sally.'

'Yeah, thanks, Bob,' said Delaney.

'Well, partly so, enough I guess for him to waggle,' added the nurse. 'It was early, and it was pretty cold, mind you.'

Delaney held up his hand. 'Can we concentrate on the man, not just the member?'

'He was about five ten, wearing a fawn-coloured overcoat, he might have had a suit on under his coat, he had dark trousers anyway.'

Sally flicked back through her notebook. 'You called him a raggedy man earlier.'

Valerie Manners nodded. 'Yes, it was his hair.'

Delaney waited patiently, but when there was nothing forthcoming, said, 'And? What about his hair?'

'It was raggedy, you know?'

'No?'

'Sort of wild, curly. A bit like yours.' She pointed to Delaney. 'Only longer and it hadn't been combed, it was sticking out.'

'Like his cock,' said Bob Wilkinson, his smile suddenly dying on his lips as Delaney glared at him, the detective inspector's already thin patience finally worn through.

At the mortuary Kate Walker scrubbed her hands, holding them under the hot water and rubbing the brush as if to scratch away the touch of Paul Archer. She felt like dipping them in acid.

'Are you all right, Dr Walker?' Lorraine Simons had come into the room and was watching her, concern evident in her eyes.

'I'm fine.' Kate finished her hands, drying them and slipping on a pair of latex gloves.

'You had a phone call earlier. Dr Jane Harrington. She didn't leave a message.'

Kate nodded. 'It can wait. She can't.' She walked across to the mortuary table where the body of the murdered girl was laid out in cold, clinical repose. Her naked skin pearlescent white under the bright lights, like a dead snow queen.

Kate watched as her assistant joined her at the table, wheeling across the stack of instruments with which they would try and ascertain the manner of the young woman's death. Quantify it. Render a human life into its constituent parts. Why was she doing this? she thought to herself. Working with the dead? Maybe her friend Jane was right, she had always been so sure of herself. But suddenly everything was shifting for her, nothing was fixed. Her career had always been a focus, a constant. Now? Now she didn't even know who she was any more.

She glanced across at her young assistant. 'What made you want to do this job?' she asked.

Lorraine looked at her a little puzzled. 'Don't you remember asking me that in my interview?'

Kate smiled apologetically. 'There were a lot of interviews. A lot of interviewees, all of them saying the same thing. I just wondered what it really was for you?'

Lorraine picked up a scalpel and ran her thumb along the blunt part of it. 'All through medical school I wanted to be a surgeon.'

'What changed?'

'It was a gradual thing, really. But one night, I was an intern on surgical rotation and a couple of children were brought in. A ten-year-old boy and a six-year-old girl. They had both been repeatedly stabbed. By their father.'

'Go on.'

'He was a manic-depressive. On a cocktail of antidepressants, booze and marijuana. He had an argument with his wife, picked up a carving knife and stabbed both his kids to punish her.'

'Nice.'

'The boy lasted an hour. We did what we could but he had lost a lot of blood. We worked on the girl through the night. There were multiple complications, she had been stabbed nine times. We brought her out of surgery and had to take her back in as she arrested in recovery. She arrested again on the table.' She put the scalpel down and looked steadily at Kate. 'When she arrested again we had to let her go. Even had she survived she would have been brain-dead. There was nothing we could do. We had to tell the mother she had lost both her children. Some hours later the mother jumped in front of a train on the Northern Line at Chalk Farm.'

Kate shook her head sympathetically. 'It wasn't your fault. You did what you could.'

Lorraine nodded. 'I don't blame myself. There's only one person responsible for their deaths. But I couldn't deal with it any more. I couldn't deal with the fact that whatever you do, however much you try, eventually someone will die. And if you are going to be a surgeon you have to be able to deal with that. You have to be able to detach emotionally. And I couldn't. And I didn't want to go into general practice.' She looked down on the cold body of the dead woman. 'At least in here you can't fail. Nobody pays a price for your mistakes.'

'That's true…' Kate looked at the dead woman's face, at her neck, at the start of the first incision, but knew that she was lying to her young assistant. '… and at least you didn't say you had a crush on Amanda Burton.'

'Who?'

'Good answer.'

Kate looked back at the dead woman's neck again and then bent down to get a closer look. 'What do you make of this?'

Lorraine moved around the table to see what Kate was looking at. 'It appears to be some kind of puncture wound.'

'Get the camera. Let's take some close-up shots.

Jack Delaney took a big bite out of his second bacon sandwich that day and grunted with approval. 'You're an irritating bastard at the best of times, Roy, but you make a halfway decent sandwich.'

'From anyone else I'd tell them to stick their head in a pig, but coming from you, Inspector Delaney, I'll take that as a big fucking compliment.' Roy smiled broadly, his teeth like an old piano with half the keys missing, and turned back to the book he was reading. A new science-fiction blockbuster by Peter F. Hamilton from whom he had nicked the name for his burger van.

Delaney walked across to Sally Cartwright who was delicately eating a bean burger as she leaned against the bonnet of her car. Her small teeth made precise, uniform bites. Delaney leaned beside her on the bonnet finishing his sandwich and considered matters. Now that the body of the young goth woman had been removed to the morgue, the SOCOs and uniforms were conducting a fingertip search and dusting any suitable surface. Given the overnight rain Delaney doubted there would be any chance of lifting any prints. Kate Walker had barely said three words to him since returning to the scene-of-crime tent. He hadn't expected her to be sweetness and light to him but he had hoped she could keep a professional neutrality, at least. He knew he had hurt her, but they had only slept together once after all, and that hardly constituted a relationship. And the fact of the matter was he had only ended their affair because he didn't want to see her getting hurt. He knew his own failings better than anybody and he knew he wasn't in a place right now to be of any use in her life. He couldn't remember who said it but he remembered the quote about the eleventh commandment. 'Never sleep with anybody who has got more problems than you have.' He reckoned that between Kate Walker and himself that would be a close run thing. One thing was sure, though, she was certainly taking the case this morning a whole lot more personally than he had ever seen her take one before. Kate Walker had always been practically a byword for icy efficiency, but the dead goth had certainly got to her in some way, that much was painfully obvious.

'Sir?'

Delaney blinked out of his thoughts and looked at Sally. 'Sorry, what?'

'I was asking about the raggedy-haired man. You think he's connected with the dead girl?'

Delaney finished his sandwich. 'I don't know. I think we should find him, though.'

'Do you think there is a sexual connection with the murder?'

Delaney wiped his hands and stood up. 'We'll find out soon enough if there is. But she was naked from the waist up which suggests a sexual element. And the psychiatrists tell us often enough that in these sort of crimes the knife becomes a phallic substitute.'

'Boys and their toys, eh, Inspector?'

'Something like that. Come on, Constable. Or are you going to take all day eating that burger?'

Delaney walked off, crossing over the road and headed towards White City police station, purpose in his stride.

Diane Campbell looked up from her desk as Delaney came into her office. She gestured to him as she took out a packet of cigarettes and walked to the window. 'Keep an eye out. The new super has a bug up his arse about smoking. Anyone would think it's against the law.'

'It is, Diane.'

She smiled and fired up a cigarette and opened her window slightly. 'So, what have you got for me, cowboy?'

Delaney shrugged. 'Nothing new. The body is at the morgue.'

'What's your instinct? Sexual predator? First date gone wrong? Homicidal maniac?'

'I don't know, boss. A lot of anger there, that much is clear.'

'Killed in the woods, or dumped there?'

'The doc reckons she was killed where we found her. The blood-spatter patterns seem pretty conclusive.'

'Did she give a time of death?'

'Last night.' He shrugged. 'Hopefully we'll know more after the post.'

Diane took a drag on her cigarette and looked at him. 'And what did you get up to after I dropped you off?'

'I went home and tucked myself straight up in bed like a good boy.'

'Yeah, right.'

He smiled, but his eyes were flat. Remembering.

Delaney hunched the collar of his jacket around his neck and leaned back, shielding himself from the wind as he lit the cigarette that was his excuse for getting off the train. The dark-haired woman in the carriage had reminded him of Kate. It wasn't her. Wasn't remotely like her, apart from the hair. But he couldn't keep her out of his mind and, suddenly claustrophobic with his thoughts, he had hurried through the closing doors, shouldered through the crowds, up the escalator and out into the fresh, cool air.

Eight o'clock at night and it was already dark. The black clouds overhead were pregnant with rain, a real burst of it looked imminent, but the pavement was bright from the street lamps and the wash of light that spilled from the broad windows of WH Smith which Delaney was leaning against. He stood there for a moment or two, watching people hurry across the road and into the safety of the station. He watched a woman in her forties with dyed, ill-kempt, blonde hair and a red vinyl jacket walk near the phone boxes, scanning the eyes of approaching men, looking to make a deal, needing another fix and not caring about the weather.

Delaney finished his cigarette and walked back to the station entrance. A couple of stops up the Northern Line and he'd be in Belsize Park. Back home. Only it didn't feel like home to him and he was not sure it ever would. He paused at the entrance. Maybe he should do as his boss suggested. He'd had quite a few drinks already but he was a very long way from being rat-arsed. He shook another cigarette out of a packet and lit it, feeling his heart pound in his chest, and came to a decision. He blew out a stream of smoke and started walking. Away from the station towards the British Library. He crossed over the road, running to dodge the traffic, and walked a couple of hundred yards up Pentonville Road towards Judd Street and went into a pub on the corner of the two roads. An Irish bar, a proper one, not a diddly shamrock theme pub. The warmth and the noise wrapped around him as he entered, the light was bright but, for a change, Delaney didn't mind that. He walked across the scuffed wooden floor to the long, scruffy bar and ordered a large whiskey and a pint of Guinness from the freckled woman in her thirties who was stood behind it. He had downed the whiskey before the Guinness had settled and ordered another one. He was sipping it a little bit more slowly when a soft, hot, moist voice whispered in his ear.

'Hello, stranger.'

He turned round and took another sip of the whiskey, looking into the cool, green eyes of the woman who had sat on the stool next to him. Her hip rubbing against his thigh. She was dressed in skintight jeans, a cream-coloured wool jumper and a brown suede jacket. Delaney smiled at her and raised his glass. 'Stella Trant.'

'In the flesh.' Stella leaned against the bar putting her shoulders back in a feline manner, stretching the jumper across her braless chest.

Delaney smiled again and looked again into her deep, green eyes, seeing the playfulness sparking in them now. 'Buy you a drink?'

Stella smiled, nodding, and rubbed her arm, wincing a little.

'You hurt yourself?'

'Tennis elbow. Professional injury.'

'You play tennis?'

'Swinging a whip. Toy one, made of suede. Some guy had me manacle him to a wall in his cellar and pretend to whip him heavily for an hour.' She rubbed her arm again. 'The novelty soon wears off.' She looked at him pointedly and smiled. 'Reminds me a lot of you by the way. Same hair, same dress sense.'

Delaney shook his head, a smile on the edge of his lips. 'Not me. I don't play at things.'

'Is that a fact?'

Delaney looked at her steadily as he finished his second whiskey. 'Not unless I win.'

'Maybe next time I'll let you.'

Superintendent George Napier did little to hide his dislike of the man standing in front of his desk. The man's eyes were bloodshot, his hair was too long, too curly, too far from neatly combed. Altogether there was a sense of looseness to his appearance. Jack Delaney. Slack Delaney more like! Too cocky, too casual, too damned indifferent. George Napier was not a man who did casual and had little time for those that did. He didn't much care for the Irish either. He didn't trust them. He still remembered hundreds of Irish men and women lining the streets of Kilburn to mark the funeral of one of their IRA heroes. Once a criminal always a criminal in his book, and he recognised the status of the IRA as a legitimate political operation about as much as he recognised the legitimacy of the claim Argentina had on the Falklands. Mainly he didn't like the man's sullen, mute insolence. No respect for authority. That was obvious. Like many of his generation he would have benefited from National Service.

George Napier was too young himself to have gone through National Service, but he had joined the Territorial Army while at university and when he graduated it had been a toss-up between the armed forces and the police. The police had won by a narrow margin. The man in front of him wouldn't last a weekend with the TA he decided, let alone the proper army.

As far as he was concerned the police force should be like a domestic army. Anybody who didn't realise they were fighting a war nowadays hadn't read the papers or listened to the news. Never mind the war on terror; the amount of guns and knives on the streets made the boroughs of London every bit as dangerous a place to live as Beirut in his opinion. And to fight that, to bring law and order back to the country, took vision, it took backbone and it took discipline, by God. And although he knew that the man standing in front of him had been responsible for bringing down a couple of bad apples within the department, he was far from convinced that Delaney wasn't a bruised fruit himself. He put the report he had been reading into a folder and shook his head.

'I'm sorry, but that won't be possible. It wouldn't be appropriate, I'm afraid, Inspector.'

'I was responsible for the man's arrest, and he has vital information on another case, sir.'

The superintendent picked up the folder again and waved it at Delaney. 'As I recall it, after his arrest he had to spend time in accident and emergency with a suspected fractured skull. And the other case is the incident in which your wife died?'

'That's right.'

'Given your involvement in that incident, and the fact that it was your wife who was killed, I don't think it is appropriate for you to take the lead on this investigation. Which is why I have instructed Detective Inspector Skinner to coordinate with the prison authorities and their internal investigation.'

'With respect, sir, Norrell said he would only speak to me.'

The superintendent frowned. 'I don't think he is in any condition to speak to anyone just now.'

'Convenient timing.'

Superintendent Napier sighed. 'Concentrate on this dead woman on the common, Delaney. Any movement on identifying her?'

'Nothing yet, but we're working on it. She doesn't match anyone on the missing persons' register.'

'I want a tight lid, Delaney. I've already had the press wanting details.'

'Maybe it would help, sir. Someone probably knows her.'

'We speak to the press when I say. We clear on that, Inspector?'

'Sir.'

Delaney turned to leave, pausing at the door as the superintendent called him back.

'One more thing, Delaney.'

'Sir?'

'I am well aware what happened between you and my predecessor. Diane Campbell argued very strongly for bringing you back into the fold. I think you should know that I had grave misgivings but allowed myself to be persuaded by her. I hope you are not going to let me down.'

'Just let me do my job, sir. That's all I ask.'

The superintendent stood and picked up the file, nodding a dismissal to Delaney. 'Go and do it then.'

Delaney shut the door behind him. Napier walked across to a filing cabinet and put the folder in the top drawer. He looked at himself in the mirror and smoothed his hair with the flat of his hand. He kept himself in very good condition. A punishing fitness schedule, good bone structure and clear, ebony skin made him look younger than his fifty-two years, but the white hair above his ears told the true story. As he looked at his temples critically, he considered, yet again, dyeing his hair, but then discounted it, as he always did. Gravitas was far more becoming in a career policeman than vanity. And George Napier was nothing if not ambitious.

He sat back behind his desk and thought about the surly policeman who had just left his office. He wasn't sure there was a place for people like him in the force any more, but time would tell: Jack Delaney could be a help or a hindrance to him. And most of the people who had spoken to the superintendent said Delaney was a first-rate detective with good instincts and a great success rate. If his foot danced a little outside the touchline now and again that was fine by him, as long as he didn't drop the ball. But if he did lose it in the tackle, if he became more of a liability than an asset, then George Napier was going to come down on him like an All Blacks front line. Guaranteed.

Delaney paused at the drinks cooler filling a cup as DI Jimmy Skinner approached. Delaney was still considered tall, at six feet, but Jimmy Skinner had a good few inches on him. He was a lot thinner, though, and pale-faced from too many nights playing Internet poker. His wife had left him the previous January because he had refused to walk away from an online game at midnight to hear Big Ben chime the New Year in and kiss her on the final bong. He had felt quite justified, however, as he was holding two aces with a third on the flop. But his wife didn't see it that way, and now he had even more time on his hands. 'You've simply got to know when to hold them, know when to fold them,' he had told his divorce lawyer, who had told him that it was his balls his wife was holding, fiscally speaking, and that she was going to cut them off. Which she proceeded to do, leaving Skinner a fiscal soprano.

Skinner helped himself to a cup of water and looked at Delaney. 'You spoke to the new big cheese then?'

Delaney drank his water in a long gulp almost feeling the liquid rehydrating his veins. 'Yup.'

'What do you make of him?'

'Remember the old joke about how to become a policeman?'

'Grow a tit on your head and paint it blue?'

Delaney threw his cup in the bin. 'You're looking into the Norrell thing, I hear.'

'You tag along any time you want to, Jack.'

Delaney nodded. 'Appreciate it, Jimmy.'

'You were due to see him this morning?'

'First thing, yeah.'

'Seems like a hell of a coincidence he was taken out before you got there then.'

Delaney grunted. 'I don't believe in coincidences.'

'You think he genuinely knew something about your wife's death?'

'Nothing in it for him if he was making it up.'

'Kevin Norrell was never a grass.'

'Yeah, well, your perspectives change when you're standing naked in a shower surrounded by hardened criminals. No pun intended.'

'True.'

'Or when there's a contract out on you.'

Skinner looked at him, a little surprised. 'You think that was the case?'

'I think as soon as he started offering to sing like a canary, someone wanted to snap off his beak and clip his wings. Permanently.'

'He was meant to go down hard. That's for certain. But if they thought he was dealing kiddie porn…?' He shrugged. 'Could just be that, cowboy.'

'It's too neat. Someone in there wanted him shut up and quickly.'

Delaney and Skinner walked back towards the CID offices. 'You saw one of the guys who attacked him?'

'Martin Quigley. But he isn't saying anything. Norrell smashed him up pretty good with a lavatory bowl. Fractured his jaw in three places.'

'Helpful.'

'But he can write. He claims they took Norrell out as a matter of course, like they would any other kiddie fiddler, given half the chance. No other agenda.'

'You believe him?'

'I don't know. He might have been roped in. He's just as much an ape for hire as Norrell himself. Paid to hurt not to think. And Norrell was involved with Walker who was involved big time in kiddie porn. It's a good cover story if you have another reason for wanting him dead.'

Delaney said goodbye to Skinner, stuck his head round the CID office door and beckoned to Sally Cartwright. 'Come on, Constable, you're with me.'

Sally stood up from her desk, a little flushed, quickly closing down the report she had been reading on her computer. She picked up her jacket from the back of her chair and joined Delaney.

He looked back at her computer as her screensaver came on. 'What are you working on?'

'Just catching up with some paperwork.' She avoided his eyes and headed briskly out to the corridor. 'Where are we going?'

'South Hampstead Tube.'

'Sir?'

Delaney walked beside her and held out a photofit picture that the computer artist had generated from Valerie Manners' description of the flasher on the common. 'Our man might have been wearing a suit, she said?'

'Apparently. Under his mac,' Sally confirmed.

'So what does that tell us?'

'That flashing isn't just a blue-collar crime and he's probably not a student.'

'Exactly, he's up too early in the morning for a start. Maybe he was giving his John Thomas a quick airing before putting in a hard day at the office…' He looked at Sally and smiled. 'As it were.'

'Which do you reckon came first, sir? The book or the expression? I've often wondered.'

'What are you on about?' Delaney asked, puzzled.

'John Thomas and Lady Jane. Lady Chatterley's Lover.'

Delaney threw her a look. 'I know you've got a degree and all that shite, Detective Constable, but do you think you could save the book-club chit-chat for your weekend dinner parties and concentrate on the case?'

'You reckon he was heading for the Tube?'

'He lives or works near here. And given the timing it is more likely he was on his way to work somewhere out of the locality.'

'So you think he lives somewhere near the heath?'

'Sexual predators like to operate within a comfort zone. Somewhere they know well. So if something happens they know where to run to.'

'And the murdered girl. Does she live locally, do you think?'

The desk sergeant called out as they headed to the front entrance. 'Good to see you back, Jack.'

'Cheers, Dave.' He opened the front door for Sally. 'I don't know about the girl. It depends if it was an opportunistic or planned killing. Time of death will help.'

'Not going to be wandering on the heath in the dead of night you mean.'

Delaney nodded as they walked over to Sally's car. 'It's unlikely.'

'Mind you, it was a full moon last night.'

'Meaning?'

Sally fished out her car keys and opened the driver's door to her car. 'Well, it brings out the crazies. And her being a goth. Maybe there's a connection. The mystic power of the moon and all that.'

Delaney got into the car next to her and stretched his legs forward. 'The moon might play a part in paganism. Witchcraft, Wicca, that kind of thing. Not sure it applies to goths.'

'No. But the belt buckle. I've been thinking about it.'

'What about it?'

'Looking at the photos more closely both sides had a representation of the Green Man. Big pagan symbol.'

Delaney nodded thoughtfully. 'Maybe, and there may have been a full moon last night, but you'd never have been able to see it. Not with all that cloud cover and rain.'

'I suppose not. So, it looks like the body was dumped there. She could have come from anywhere.'

'"Ill met by moonlight, proud Titania."'

Sally looked across at him, frowning as she fired up the engine. 'Sir?'

'What? You surprised I know a little Shakespeare? They do have schools in Ireland, you know.'

'Yeah, I do know that. Put your seat belt on.'

Delaney sighed and pulled the strap across. 'And it's cockney rhyming slang.'

'What is?'

'John Thomas. So the expression came first.'

'Oh.' Sally smiled. 'So what does it rhyme with?'

Delaney considered for a moment, then sighed and flapped his hand. 'Just drive the car, Constable.'

'On average two and a half million people use the tube system every day and I'm guessing something like bloody plenty of them use South Hampstead station,' Delaney said as he stood up from the computer, rubbed his sore eyes and yawned.

Sally paused the CCTV footage and looked up at him, amusement quirking the corners of her mouth. 'Must have been some night.'

Delaney yawned again, putting his hand in front of his mouth. 'You have no idea.'

Sally gestured at the computer screen. 'We're up to twelve o'clock.'

Delaney nodded and stretched his eyes. 'Let's get these photos in front of the nurse, see if she recognises any of them.'

Sally collected three photos that had been printed out of some possible men that matched the description of the flasher they had been given by Valerie Manners and stood up.

Kate Walker was sitting at her computer typing up her notes for the post-mortem on the mystery woman. She pushed the print icon and some moments later picked up a ten by eight, black-and-white close-up of the woman's neck. Someone had slashed her hard enough to slice the flesh clear to the bone. What kind of anger could have fuelled such brutality? Even if the attack was sexually motivated it still came down to anger. Impotent rage, maybe, as it was clear the woman had not been sexually assaulted. No evidence of it at least. The irony of the thought was not lost on her and she shivered again, thinking about the possibility that it could have been her dead body being examined by one of her colleagues. How close a tightrope to death we walk in life, she thought. How fragile the human body is. How soft and defenceless against true purpose, true will to hurt. And yet we dance on the tightrope blindfolded, and laugh while we do it. Only Kate didn't feel like laughing today. She wasn't sure she ever would again. The telephone rang suddenly, shrilly. She started, her heart thumping in her chest, and snatched the phone up, taking a moment or two to steady her shattered nerves before answering. 'Kate Walker.'

'Kate, it's Caroline Akunin.'

Kate took in a deep breath. 'Go on.'

'I haven't got the blood work back…' She paused.

'But?' asked Kate.

'But, I ran a check on Paul Archer.'

'And?'

'He's out on police bail at the moment, Kate. Pending trial. He's already been charged with rape.'

Kate was puzzled for a moment. 'What do you mean?'

'His estranged wife. She's charged him with rape. The court case is coming up this week. He's a rapist, Kate.'

Kate nodded, taking it in, she couldn't speak for a moment. 'I'm coming in to White City now for a briefing, I'll come and see you while I'm there.'

She hung up the phone and collected the photographs and her printed out notes. She stood up and winced, holding a hand to her stomach and had to fight the urge to throw up again.

Valerie Manners looked impatiently at her watch and scowled at Danny Vine, the uniformed constable who was stood by the door of the interview room at the front part of White City police station. It was a featureless, plain room, with a rectangular table, six plastic chairs and a couple of windows looking out to the car park. Not a particularly pleasant place to spend any length of time. She looked at her watch again. 'How much longer are they going to be?' she snapped.

The newly qualified constable shrugged. 'They're on their way. Hard to tell.'

'Well, it's not good enough. I'm due back on shift in a few hours and I've hardly had time to catch forty winks, let alone have a proper sleep.'

'You could always call in. You have had a traumatic day.'

The nurse shook her head angrily. 'You see, that's what's wrong with this generation. The slightest thing and people can just call in. Where would we be if the RAF had just called in in 1940?'

'I don't know, ma'am.'

'Well, I tell you where we'd be. We'd be right here,' she said, realising that wasn't quite what she meant. 'Only we wouldn't be speaking English, would we? We'd be speaking German.'

'I've got an A level in German.'

Valerie glared at him. 'Is that supposed to be funny?'

'No. I was just saying.'

'And that's another wrong. People are always "just saying". In my day, young man, people did. They didn't say. They got on with it. They got the job done.'

Danny Vine sighed inwardly with relief as the handle on the door turned and DI Jack Delaney and DC Sally Cartwright came into the room.

'Sorry to keep you waiting, Ms Manners.'

Valerie smiled sweetly at Delaney. 'That's quite all right, Detective Inspector. As I was just explaining to the young officer…' she gestured unimpressed at Danny Vine, 'I am only too happy to do my civic duty. Only too happy.'

'We're very grateful.'

The nurse held her hand up. 'No gratitude necessary. I am from a generation that steps up to the line when the call comes.'

Delaney pulled out a chair and sat opposite her. He opened a folder and put the photographs of the men they had pulled from the security footage from South Hampstead Tube station.

'I'd like you to look at these photos, Ms Manners. See if you recognise any of the men as the gentleman you encountered this morning.'

'The pervert, you mean. He was certainly no gentleman.'

She pulled out a pair of glasses from her handbag and perched them on the end of her nose as she looked at the photographs Delaney had handed her across the table. She studied each one for a long time before looking up and taking her glasses off. 'They all look possible.'

'But you can't be sure.'

The nurse shrugged apologetically. 'Well, if I'm honest my eyes weren't exactly drawn to his face, if you see what I mean.'

Sally Cartwright stepped forward. 'Could you look again, Ms Manners?'

Valerie Manners picked up the photos and looked at them again, then shook her head and handed the photos back to Sally. 'Sorry, but any one of them could be him. Is it possible to see photos of the area of exposure, as it were?'

Sally blinked, not quite sure she had heard correctly. 'I beg your pardon?'

'I am a nurse after all. And it might help.'

Danny Vine couldn't hold back a short laugh and Delaney glared at him. 'Wait outside, Constable.'

'Sir.' Danny hurried out of the room, shutting the door behind him.

Delaney turned back to Valerie Manners. 'I'm sorry, ma'am. But that won't be possible. It would be a procedural irregularity, I'm afraid.'

'It's just the injury. Very unlikely two people would have the same.'

Delaney took the photos off Sally and flicked through them quickly. 'What do you mean, the injury?'

'To his penis. Quite extensive scarring, and some deformation I would say.'

'What?' Delaney couldn't believe what he was hearing.

'It was quite noticeable.' She looked up at Delaney's surprised expression. 'I'm sorry. Didn't I mention that?'

'No, ma'am. You didn't.'

'Do you think it might be important?'

DI Jimmy Skinner was well aware that the chatter beneath him had stopped as soon as the clang of his hard leather shoes on the metal walkway echoed around the large building. He looked over the railing, down at the many prisoners who were scattered about the recreation area, their faces turned up to his momentarily and then back to what they had been doing. Noise filled the building again. The sound of caged men resigned to their fate. The truth was Jimmy Skinner felt a lot of empathy for them. They were all gamblers in the main, much like him. Jimmy recognised that, just like he had been in the past many, many times, these men had been fucked on the river. Deliverance they called it. The odds had been in his favour, it was science after all, but the cards had turned up and defied the odds and he had taken a bad beat. He himself had taken a lot of bad beats over the years, just like the men below. Someone had lost their nerve or a car had failed to start, or a family that should have been on holiday had cancelled at the last minute and were at home when they shouldn't have been. Bad beats all. Or the baddest beat of the lot: being born in the wrong part of London in the wrong kind of family. The kind of family that had no hope outside of crime. No hope because the system had fucked them on the river before they'd even been born, and now the only way out was by the gun or knife, or with a flame and a spike and a packet of temporary oblivion to trade. So he felt a kind of sympathy for them. Not for the rapists, mind, or the child abusers or the soulless killers. For them he'd have a rope waiting, see how the cards fell on the ultimate gamble of all.

The prison guard coughed and Jimmy Skinner turned back to him and carried on walking towards the open cell doors and put the men below out of his mind. One thing you learned playing poker was that you put the past behind you and moved on to your next game. Chasing losses was a sure way to destruction and Jimmy Skinner wasn't that kind of gambler. He didn't play to lose, he played to stay even, so he could play again.

The officer, a wide-set man in his forties with steel-grey hair and eyes as bereft of humour as a warehouse guard dog, stood by the open door of one of the cells and jerked with his thumb to show Jimmy the man inside.

Neil Riley was a scrawny, long-haired man in his early thirties, with skin the colour of church candles and tattoos covering both his arms. Tattoos that hadn't been modelled on any works of the great Renaissance artists as far as Jimmy Skinner could see. He was sat on his bed rolling a cigarette and looked up dispassionately as the policeman entered the cell.

Jimmy fished a new packet of cigarettes out of his pocket and threw it on the bed besides him. The man looked at it, a sneer quirking the corner of his thin-lipped mouth. 'You better do better than fucking that.'

Jimmy nodded then picked up the packet of cigarettes from the bed, put them in his pocket and slapped the man back-handed, hard across his face.

'The fuck you think you're doing? I got rights, you know.'

A snort of laugher came from the guard outside and Jimmy clicked his fingers to get the man's attention. 'First rule. You don't swear in my presence.'

'Fuck that.'

Jimmy hit him hard again, the other side of his face this time, open-palmed.

'Jesus Christ!'

Skinner hit him back-handed again. 'Or blaspheme.'

Neil Riley scrambled up on the bed, putting his back to the wall and held his hand up at Skinner. 'All right, you made your f-' He caught himself. 'You made your point.'

Skinner nodded. 'Good.'

'And I don't know what you want to see me for. I don't know anything about anything.'

'You know Kevin Norrell, don't you?'

'I knew him.'

Skinner leaned in pointedly. 'He isn't dead yet, Riley.'

The sallow-faced man looked surprised. 'I thought-'

'What did you think?'

'I heard he was dead, that's all.'

'And where did you hear that from?'

Riley shrugged. 'Word gets round. What do you think, this place is a Carmelite nunnery? You think nobody talks?'

Skinner was a little surprised, and ignoring his own rules, said, 'What do you know about the fucking Carmelites?'

'I went to a convent primary school.'

'I thought that was just for girls?'

'No. Some are mixed up to a certain age.'

Skinner caught himself. 'Can we get back to the fucking point here?'

'I was just saying.'

'Never mind all that bollocks, just tell me who told you Norrell was dead.'

'I don't know, what does it matter who told me?'

'Someone took five inches of sharpened steel and tried to make a shish kebab out of his organs with it. Maybe that was the guy who told you, that's what matters.'

Riley shook his head. 'Get real, Detective. Whoever did it is going to keep his mouth shut, isn't he?'

Skinner glared at him for a moment or two, resisting the urge to slap him hard around the head again just for the fun of it. 'Let's get back to the point, shall we?'

'Which is?'

'Which is: you were a friend of Kevin Norrell.'

'Says who?'

Skinner looked around the cell. 'You see anyone else standing in this fucking room?'

Riley shrugged again. 'I knew him a little.'

'Come off it, Riley. You think we don't read files? You grew up on the same estate as him. You've been busted together more than once. You knew the man.'

Riley hesitated for a moment, as if weighing up his options. Finally he said, 'Yeah, I knew him.'

'He's on remand. He gets to speak to people. And the information is that you and he were buddy-buddy in here.'

'Someone has to watch your back.'

'You did a good job of watching his.'

Riley held his skinny arms up. 'What good would I be? You know Norrell, he didn't need me riding on his wing.'

'So what did you do for him?'

'I've been here a while. I know who's who and what's what. I filled him in.'

'What was he going to tell Delaney?'

Riley pulled a face, so Skinner slapped him hard again. Sometimes he loved being a policeman. Riley yelped and the guard from outside looked in again. He grinned and nodded to Skinner with approval.

'For Christ's sake, what was that for?'

He flinched and pressed back against the wall as Skinner leaned in, but he didn't hit him this time. 'I'll ask the question again. What was he going to tell Delaney?'

Riley shook his head, agitated now. 'I honestly don't know. His court case was coming up soon. Preliminary hearings. He told me he had stuff on Chief Superintendent Walker. Maybe he was looking to make a deal.'

'He said it was about Delaney's wife.'

'He never said anything to me about it. But if he wanted to see Delaney that was a sure-fire way of getting him in.'

'What else would he want to see him for?'

Riley shook his head. 'Fuck knows, you're the detective.'

Some people just couldn't help themselves.

Paul Archer strode angrily down the steps, shrugging into his overcoat. The woman behind the reception desk smiled at him but he ignored her. She wasn't his type and he had taken the afternoon off for more particular distractions than the kind offered in idle badinage with insipid blondes. Paul Archer had the kind of itch that could only be scratched by a certain type of woman. And he knew just where to find her.

Delaney stood in front of the briefing room. On the board behind him were pinned the photographs taken of the dead woman they had found in the woods. Hampstead's very own Black Dahlia, he couldn't help thinking.

'All right, listen up.' Delaney raised his voice above the chatter that filled the room and conversations died as they focused their attention on the detective inspector. 'Now, as yet we don't have any ID on the woman. We think she was murdered sometime during last night. We're placing her age, give or take a few years, in her mid-twenties.'

'Was she killed in the woods, or dumped there?' Audrey Hobson, a uniformed inspector in her fifties, called out.

'Best we can tell, she was killed where we found her.'

'An opportunist killing, or was she taken there?'

'We don't know, Audrey. It was lousy weather. It was cold, windy, raining. It's unlikely she'd be in the woods alone at that time of night.'

PC Bob Wilkinson spoke out. 'It's possible. Like Sally said earlier. Maybe it's some witchcraft thing. She's dressed up as a goth. You know how some of them fruitcakes are. Lesbians and pagans, give them a full moon and they start believing all kind of bollocks. '

Diane Campbell glared at him. 'Not very helpful, Constable.'

Delaney stopped himself from smiling as he held his hand up to quell the beginnings of laughter in the room. 'Nothing's discounted. Most likely scenario is that she was taken there, though. Sex attackers don't usually hang around in rainstorms looking for victims.'

Sally Cartwright held up her hand. She looked like she should still be in school, Delaney thought, but was glad she wasn't. She may look like a Girl Guide, but he knew beneath that pretty exterior was what his North American colleagues would have called a tough cookie. He'd had to depend on her more than once and she hadn't let him down. 'Yes, Constable?'

'Is there anything in the database matching the MO?'

'Good question. We're running it through at the moment. Until we get the detailed post it's all rather general. No immediate hits.'

Diane Campbell stepped forward. 'What leads are you pursuing, Jack?'

'A flasher was operating early this morning, near the scene of the crime.'

'You think he was involved?'

'Unlikely. But he may have seen something.'

'You have a good ID on him?'

'Pretty good. This isn't a run-of-the-mill flasher.'

'Go on.'

Delaney produced a couple of A3 sheets of paper. He pinned the first on the wall. It showed an artist's rendition of a wild-haired man in his late twenties, early thirties. 'This is the man we're looking for, and this…' He hesitated before putting up the second picture. 'This is his penis.'

There was some wincing, some groaning and some laughter at the second picture that Delaney pinned on the board. An artist's rendition, blown up, from the nurse's description, of the man's scarred penis.

'Is that life-size?' Bob Wilkinson couldn't resist it, and now the laughter rippled round the room like a rumbling sea at high tide.

'All right, children, that's enough.' Diane Campbell's voice barked and the room fell silent. 'Have a look at the picture over there.' She pointed at the dead woman's mutilated body. 'Any one of you find anything funny in that?' She looked pointedly at Bob Wilkinson.

'No, ma'am.'

Delaney's phone chose that moment to ring. He looked at the caller and shrugged apologetically at his boss. 'I've got to take this. I'll be right back.'

Delaney strode quickly from the briefing room before Diane Campbell could stop him and answered the call in the corridor outside. 'What have you got for me, Jimmy?'

On the other end of the phone, DI Jimmy Skinner's voice sounded thin and echoing, the sound of men in the background telling Delaney he was calling from the prison. 'Hi, Jack. I'm at Bayfield.'

'I gathered. Go on.'

'Nobody's talking. I put the hard word on Neil Riley, Norrell's old oppo, and according to him Kevin Norrell was taken down because of the kiddie porn.'

'You believe him?'

'I don't know, Jack. Something feels hinky.'

'You reckon it has anything to do with my wife?'

'Maybe. But you know as well as I do that you can trust Norrell as far as you could throw him one-handed. Which is ruddy nowhere. The guy's a timeserving prick of the first order.'

'Why lie about it?'

There was a pause and Delaney could picture Skinner shrugging at the other end of the line. 'The guy was desperate. That much seems clear. Whether it was because he knew there was a hit out on him, or about the trial coming up, who knows? His mate reckons that he had something on Chief Superintendent Walker, perhaps. He was looking to deal. Maybe talking about your wife was the best way to get you in to see him.'

'Maybe…' But Delaney wasn't convinced. Kevin Norrell had the brainpower of a fermented melon, but even he wouldn't be stupid enough to jerk Delaney's chain over his dead wife. Delaney glanced down at the stairs at the end of the corridor as the sound of high heels clicking rhythmically on the wooden steps grew louder. 'Keep on it, Jimmy.'

Delaney snapped his phone shut and looked across as Kate came up the stairs and headed towards the briefing room, unwrapping her scarf from her neck and taking off her gloves. If she was a little taken aback to see Delaney waiting outside the door, she didn't betray it in her body language. Delaney watched her confident stride, the determined set to her jaw, but in her eyes he saw something that disturbed him. Something that went against her usual, poised exterior. Something that reached out to him in a primal sense. Something very much like fear.

'Kate.'

'Not now, Jack.' She sailed past him.

Delaney hurried after her and took her arm. He was shocked to see the way she flinched away. 'I'm sorry.'

She looked at him, anger flaring behind the fear that was still liquid in her deep, brown eyes. 'Sorry for what exactly?'

Delaney hesitated. 'I didn't mean to startle you.'

Kate nodded, as if his answer had confirmed her thoughts, lessened him once again in her eyes, and he felt the shame of it like a creeping feeling on his skin. 'I need to get to the meeting,' she said.

She opened the door and walked into the briefing room before Delaney had a chance to say anything more.

Jimmy Skinner was heading down the iron staircase to be taken back through to the reception area when Derek Watters, the guard who had been posted outside Neil Riley's cell, fell into step behind him. He spoke quietly.

'You want to know what was going down with Kevin Norrell?'

Skinner turned back to look at him but the guard gestured him on.

'Just keep walking. I'll talk to you about it, but not here and not for gratis.'

'What are you after?'

'A drink. A serious drink. I reckon Delaney's good for it.'

'When and where?'

They reached the bottom of the stairs.

'Six o'clock. The Pillars of Hercules. Soho.'

Skinner nodded, imperceptibly, as another guard approached.

'All right, Derek. I'll take him from here.'

Derek Watters slapped Skinner on the arm as the other guard led him away and back towards the entrance.

At four o'clock in the afternoon, it doesn't matter what time of year, Soho is a busy place. But the White Horse pub, just down the road from Walker's Court, was relatively quiet today; as quiet as it was most days during the week, after lunch and before the workers came off shift. Later on it would be bustling with the regulars who preferred the scruffy traditionalism of a proper London boozer to the trendy bars that had recently sprung up around Soho like mushrooms in an autumn wood. Soho took its name, most believed, from the old hunting cry Soho, much like the Tally ho that still sounds from blue-blooded lips up and down the shires, hunting ban or no. Less fanciful, perhaps, was that the name just came from a shortening of South Holborn.

The dark-haired man sitting on his own in the pub preferred the first version. As far as he was concerned, Soho was still a hunting ground. The best kind.

The White Horse was a pub he liked to drink in and watch people. A spit-and-sawdust bar with a dirty, wooden planked floor and a look about it as faded as an old man's shirt. The man liked it because he could look at the whores as they worked the street outside, and watch them closer when they came in for a nip of cheap vodka against the elements. Their skinny legs sometimes encased in fishnet stockings and knee-length boots, sometimes bare and cold in red leather shoes, their painted smiles cracking in the sudden warmth like old varnish as they took a brief respite from the cold outdoors.

At the moment, however, there were just a few tourists sheltering from the persistent rain and a couple of old men, seated separately and so far gone on strong beer that time meant nothing them. When they got up in the morning the pub was open and when they went home and collapsed the pub was open, and all that filled the hours in between waking and sleeping was the slow annihilation of thought, feeling and memory. Annihilation by the pint and shot glass.

The man seated at the round table by the entrance door watched the old men with contempt undisguised in his eyes. His right hand caressed his left wrist.

He looked up at the television set above the corner of the bar. He'd been watching the news now for over an hour. No mention of his own artistry that day on the heath. No mention at all. And that made him angry.

The woman reading the news was young, blonde and very pretty. The man took a sip of his drink and watched her lips moving, not listening to the words she was saying. It was all irrelevant. Her lips were full, coloured with a soft, strawberry-pink lipstick. He licked his own lips, as if he could taste hers.

He ran his finger around the circle of moisture on the cracked surface of the wooden table and something sparked in his eyes. Not anger, or self-pity, but desire. He looked up at the television screen again. At the face of Melanie Jones, the news reporter from Sky News, as she smiled at the camera and wittered on about the change in the weather and coastal erosion in some Norfolk village nobody had ever heard of.

It was clear they had no knowledge of what he had done. And it was equally clear that the police had failed to grasp the significance of it. He needed to go to work again. Sometimes it took two pieces of the puzzle for someone to see the connection. Sometimes it took more. Well, if they needed another piece, he'd give it to them. Can you see what it is yet? Art is nothing without an audience after all. He smiled to himself taking another sip of his drink and looked at the elderly man at the bar who was watching him with a curious look in his eye, after a moment or two the man looked away and turned his attention back to his pint of Guinness. Some things you didn't want to look at too closely.

Especially in London.

Kate Walker looked at the photographs on the wall. Pictures of a young woman, once vital, now lying on a cold shelf in the morgue. Anatomy of a murder. She looked at the cold savagery of the slashes on the woman's body and felt sick for her race.

Kate could feel the restlessness in the room behind her as she continued to look at the photos. But she needed a moment or two to collect herself. Her heart was racing, as it had been since morning, and her skin was clammy. She'd never felt like this before in one of these meetings. Some people were terrified talking to a large number of people, it was the top fear in the country, bigger even than spiders or snakes, but that had never been one of her phobias. She knew more than most people she ever met and didn't mind demonstrating it. It was a measure of just how rattled she was that she was nervous now. She took a breath or two and turned round and nodded to the assembled policemen and women. 'As you already know we're putting her age at mid-twenties. Time of death between one o'clock and two o'clock last night.'

The young constable who had been guarding the body from the prurient gaze of the public earlier in the morning raised his hand.

'Can I ask a question?'

'Of course,' Kate said. 'What is it, Constable?'

'How can you be so sure about the time of death? What are the signs?' Danny Vine asked, his notebook open and his pen ready.

Amusement rippled round the room. Kate glared at them. 'All right. Some of you know as much about forensic pathology as I do – in your own opinion. But for the benefit of those who don't, there are a number of ways of determining time of death. It's a science but it's not an exact science. Rigor mortis usually sets in about three or four hours after death with full rigor about twelve hours later. Our victim hadn't reached that stage yet. So that's one thing. Ambient temperature plays a part though. Three to four hours is the norm with mild temperatures.'

'It was brass monkeys last night, ma'am.'

'Yes, thank you, Constable Wilkinson. You're right, it was bloody cold last night so that skews our calculations. But there are other factors we can use.' She looked across to see Danny Vine was taking copious notes. Keen to be a detective, she reckoned. She took a sip of water to allow him to catch up.

'Other conditions factor in. The age of the body, how active the person was prior to death. If they were very active then rigor mortis can set in quicker. We don't know what this woman was doing prior to her murder but at that time of night we can assume she hadn't been jogging on the heath. So we look at other indicators.' She pointed to the photos mounted on the display panels.

'The heart, as you all know, is a muscle that pumps blood around the body. Once that pump stops working, at the time of death, blood collects in the most dependent parts of the body. That is livor mortis. Then the body stiffens, which is rigor mortis, and then with no heat being generated post mortem, the body begins to cool and this is the algor mortis stage.'

She pointed at the blue staining on the body of the dead woman. 'Blood will collect in those parts of the body that are in contact with the ground. Most commonly the back and the buttocks when the person is lying face up. The skin is pale because all the blood that keeps it pink drains into the larger veins. It can take minutes or hours after death, but livor mortis will manifest itself on the skin.'

She pointed to a close-up photograph of the discoloration on the woman's face. 'These purplish blemishes are what embalmers call post-mortem stain. It takes a few hours but after that the blood becomes what we call fixed. That is, it won't move to other parts of the body if the corpse is moved. So we can use that to also determine where the murder took place. And, in this instance, together with the other factors such as the arterial spray in the immediate area, we can say pretty definitely that the woman was killed in the place where she was discovered.'

Kate walked back to the desk and took another sip of water. She was aware that Delaney was watching her but determined to keep professional.

'There is a condition, at the time of death, known as primary flaccidity.'

'Bob Wilkinson knows all about that,' a female officer called out from the back of the room, and laughter erupted. Kate smiled, the grim photos on the wall behind were testament to the seriousness of the situation but the laughter didn't mean anyone in the room wasn't focused on the dead woman, and finding justice for her. Black humour was just a coping mechanism, after all.

She held up a hand. 'All right, settle down. Constable Wilkinson is already no doubt well aware that there are medications available on prescription for his particular ailment, so there is no need for embarrassment nowadays.'

Bob Wilkinson scowled, taking the ribbing in good heart.

Kate waited for the laughter to subside and then continued. 'A dead body will usually stay in full rigor mortis for anything between twenty-four and forty-eight hours. After that the muscles start to relax again and secondary laxity,' she smiled apologetically at Bob Wilkinson, 'or flaccidity occurs. And it will usually follow the same pattern as it began.' She gestured behind her. 'Not applicable in this case of course. Another way of gauging how long a person has been dead is by taking the core temperature. And again we have to factor in the ambient temperature. The unseasonably cold weather last night meant that the woman's body will have cooled a lot faster than if she had been murdered at home for example. Wherever her home is.'

Kate glanced back at the mottled face of the ravaged woman and wondered if anyone was waiting for her at that home. A distraught parent or worried boyfriend. She assumed she wasn't married as she had no wedding ring, or indications that she had ever worn one.

At the back of the room, meanwhile, Delaney was watching Kate as she pinned different photographs of the murdered young woman to the display board, and talked about the forensic analytical techniques. But those details washed over him, hardly taking in what she was saying. She was discussing putrefaction as another method of establishing time of death. But again it wasn't strictly relevant as putrefaction didn't take place until the second or third day after death and Delaney had seen enough corpses in his time to know about the telltale signs of green discoloration, and the putrid odour that accompanied it. An odour that told him they were already far too late for the victim and had given the murderer a good few days' head start on them. The first twenty-four hours were often critical in a murder case and if the body was putrefying before it was discovered it wasn't a good omen.

Kate turned to the room. 'We know the victim is a young female, we know she was murdered sometime in the early hours of last night and we know we are dealing with an extremely sick individual.'

A murmur went round the room again, sensing that Kate had finished but she held her hand up for quiet once again.

'One more thing.' She walked over to the display panels again and pointed at a blown-up photo of the young woman's neck. 'There is an unusual puncture mark on her neck.'

'Vampire you think, Doctor?'

A laugh went around the room again. But a nervous one. After all, the woman had been murdered in the dead of night, under a full moon, was dressed like someone out of Bram Stoker and had a couple of pagan symbols on her belt.

Kate let the laughter subside. 'I have no idea what to think.'

The previously recorded news highlights were playing on monitors throughout the building. Melanie Jones smiling at the camera. It was a practised smile, full of hope, innocence and genuine wonder at the world. A smile that belied the news that she had just been reporting. A third teenager stabbed to death in south London that week. An eighty-three-year-old woman raped and murdered in Nottingham. The foreclosure of a car works in the Midlands that was putting five thousand people out of work. At Sky News the policy was that the viewer should want to kiss the messenger not kill her. And a lot of people wanted to kiss Melanie Jones. The news is a bitter pill, after all, and Melanie Jones provided the sweet, sweet sugar that helped the medicine go down.

At the moment it was her line producer, Ronald Bliss, that was going down. His head nestled between her thighs as she sat legs akimbo on the toilet in the ensuite in his office. She wasn't smiling now. She was looking at her nails. There was a slight chip on her left index finger. She looked across at her handbag which was propped up against Ronald's knees. She'd have loved to get her polish out of it and fix the nail, but thought it might not go down too well. She looked at her watch. He'd been at it for five minutes, breathing heavily through his nostrils and sounding like a St Bernard in labour. Bliss was five foot six and several stones overweight and Melanie hoped the heavy breathing wasn't a prelude to a heart attack. She looked down at the top of his head; he was only thirty-eight but already his hair was thinning badly. She could see the pink of his scalp through the strands of his ginger hair, and frowned slightly. Someone should tell him about dandruff shampoo, but that was his wife's job, not hers. She looked at her watch again, she'd give him a couple more minutes for form's sake then make a few whimpering noises and give him a quick wank, which should keep him happy for a week or so and her own promotion prospects on line.

A buzzing in her jacket pocket and then her phone rang. She took it out and was about to click it off when the man below mumbled, 'Answer it, I like to hear your voice.'

Melanie curled her lip at him and answered the phone, suppressing a yawn.

'Melanie Jones.'

She listened for a while and then went very still. 'Call me back in fifteen minutes. I can't talk now.' She closed her phone and patted her producer on his head, just once and wiped her palm on the sleeve of her jacket.

'Sorry, Ronald, I think I just came on.'

The man looked up, a shifty tremor in his glassine eyes. 'I don't mind.'

'Next week, eh.' She shifted her thighs, squeezing him backward and leaned over to pick her thong. Silk, diamanté-studded, eighty-five pounds from Agent Provacateur. She stood up and the man looked at her hopefully.

'Could you at least leave me the knickers?'

The call she had just received could very well turn out to be the best break of her career and so she was suddenly feeling very generous. She tossed them into his eager hand.

'I want them replaced.'

She closed the door behind her. The look of gratitude in her boss's eyes was proof, if she needed it, of just how weak men can be.

Kate walked down the corridor, wrapping the long scarf around her neck and heading for the stairs. She was happy to have put the briefing behind her, her mind wasn't on it. Much as she felt for the murdered woman, she had her own problems today. She headed down the broad staircase and walked to the police surgeon's room. She dreaded what she was about to hear. When she had worked as a police surgeon Kate had had to deal with many cases of rape. She knew that the cases reported were just the tip of the iceberg too. She'd been giving a lecture not many weeks past addressing the issue. She'd been horrified to look at the women against rape website and seen that if anything the situation was getting worse year by year. Ninety-eight per cent of domestic violence goes unreported. Two women a week murdered by their partner or ex-partner. One in six women in the country has been raped and yet only six per cent of reported rapes result in a conviction. And now, most likely, she was one of the statistics. She had no evidence that the man in her bed had assaulted her last night; it was a gut feeling, and the news that he had done it before just made her all the more certain that she had been violated. The thought of it made her feel nauseous again, her stomach lurching as though she were on a particularly choppy Channel crossing. She paused at the water cooler outside the police surgeon's office to take a drink and try and stop herself from hurling her lunch on the smooth tiles of the corridor.

Melanie Jones was standing outside in the car park of the London Apprentice. She was holding a large glass of red wine in her left hand and a Lambert amp; Butler Superking dangled from her perfectly painted lips.

'Shit,' she said looking at her mobile phone, which was staying frustratingly quiet. 'Ring, you bastard!' She sucked in a lungful of smoke and paced over to look at the river.

The recent heavy falls of rain had sluiced mud from the banks of either side of the Thames, and the strong winds had stripped dead leaves and detritus from Eel Pie Island, further upriver, to wash down and swirl in the dirty, brown water. Melanie looked at it, her lip curling. Bloody thing was like an open sewer. It was a metaphor for London she thought, she couldn't wait to put the stinking city behind her. The phone call earlier though, if it was genuine, was a career-making opportunity and could have her in America sooner than you could say world exclusive. That had been her ambition ever since she had done a presenting course at Bournemouth University a few years ago. She was born for Fox News. As a teenager she had wanted to be a model, but she was too curvy as an adult, too womanly. Her legs were long for a woman but too short for a supermodel. She'd taken Ulrika Jonsson as her inspiration. So she had started off as a weather girl before being talent-spotted by a Sky News journo at a fund-raiser for victims of the Boxing Day Tsunami. She'd rogered him senseless that night on a king-size waterbed and as a consequence he had made the right calls for her and just like that she was in with Rupert Murdoch. Not that she'd ever met the man, but maybe all that would change, and soon. The phone buzzed in her hand and she almost dropped it, her palms suddenly moist with perspiration. She already had the title of her book in mind. Intimate Conversations With a Serial Killer.

She took a deep breath and pushed the answer button, her voice like gunpowder soaked in honey.

'Melanie Jones. Talk to me.'

Caroline Akunin was standing at her window drinking a cup of white tea when Kate walked into her office. She found herself standing a lot more often these days, the baby was definitely making its presence felt. Sitting behind the sturdy police desk for any long periods of time was just not possible any more. She ran a thoughtful hand across her stomach and smiled sympathetically at Kate as she came in through the open door.

'I hope I haven't kept you waiting?' Kate asked.

'Of course not.' The police surgeon's perfect teeth flashed in a dazzling smile.

'I had a briefing to attend first. It went on longer than I thought.'

Caroline Akunin gestured to the chair in front of her desk as Kate shut the door behind her. 'Why don't you sit down, Kate?'

Kate sat in the chair and gestured at the woman's prominent belly. 'How's it going? The pregnancy.' It seemed to her an inane thing to say but suddenly she wanted to talk about anything other than the reason she had come. Now she was sitting in the police surgeon's office she didn't want to hear anything that would confirm her worst fears. If you don't name the bogeyman he can't get you, after all. That's what her mother had always told her. But, as in a lot of things, she had lied.

Caroline smiled again; Kate could easily see why her Russian husband had fallen in love with her. 'You know how it is. The first nine months are the worst.'

Kate forced herself to return the smile. The truth was she had no idea how it was. Motherhood was not high on Kate's agenda. Just thinking about the modern world, the pollution, the global warming, the disaffected hopelessness and the violence of youth, the gun deaths and knifings, the rape, assault and mutilation of women throughout the country, the fear, as essential and as constant a part of London life now as the Victorian smog used to be, and she didn't think it ever would be. Who would want to bring a child into this world? But as she looked at her friend Caroline's beatific face, a living sculpture in maternal happiness, she knew she could never convey the darkness of her thoughts to her, so she changed the subject back to what she feared the most.

'What can you tell me about what happened last night?'

Caroline Akunin sighed and pulled another chair across closer to her friend. 'I can tell you what our tests have shown so far.'

'Go on.'

'There are no physical signs of rape. No bruising, no abrasion.'

'I know that.'

'Of course, sorry.'

'Don't apologise, Caroline. Just tell me straight. I need to know.'

'Okay. Well, there are no pubic hairs.'

'None at all?'

'Just yours, Kate.'

'And there are no traces of semen?'

'None.'

Kate blew out a sigh. 'Thank God for that, at least.'

'I guess.'

Kate leaned her head back and looked at the ceiling. 'Doesn't mean, of course, that nothing happened.'

'No, it doesn't.'

'Any traces of lubricant?'

'Nope.'

'Lubricant- and spermicide-free condoms are readily available.'

Caroline nodded. 'Let's face it, Kate, he could have put a condom through a dishwasher before he used it.'

'Reused. Nice image.'

Caroline shrugged sympathetically.

'Don't tell me there's traces of Fairy Liquid power-ball?' She tried to smile but couldn't manage it this time.

'There's nothing, Kate.'

'What about date-rape drugs? Rohypnol, one of those?'

'I'm still waiting on the blood work.'

Kate clenched her hand angrily. 'There must be something he used, Caroline. Something has to show up. If this was taken to the CPS they'd laugh in our faces.'

'Let's see what the blood tests show.'

'You said he's already been charged?'

'Cautioned, charged, released on police bail and due in court this week.'

'Can you give me the details?'

Caroline stood up and shook her head sadly. 'Sorry, Kate. You know I can't do that. Completely against the rules. Client confidentiality and all that. Not to mention that it could jeopardise the case.'

Kate looked up at her, sensing there was something she wasn't saying.

Caroline smiled apologetically. 'You'll have to excuse me for a moment. One of the downsides of being pregnant is that you have to go to the loo every five minutes.'

'Okay.'

'I might be some time.' She grinned at Kate again, more broadly this time. 'Why don't you make yourself at home? Read something.' She gestured at her desk on which were stacked a pile of magazines and a single, blue folder. Kate looked at the name on the folder, Helen Archer, and smiled gratefully back up at the police surgeon.

'Thanks, Caroline.'

'Take your time.'

Caroline left and Kate pulled the folder towards her, took out the documents and started to read.

Helen Archer's hand shook slightly as she went into her house, closed her front door behind her and double locked it. On the way back home, with the wind howling and throwing the fallen leaves against her bare legs, she had jumped at every barking dog or creaking tree branch, flexing its long, skeletal fingers as though deliberately taunting her.

She walked across the polished oak floor of her hallway, kicking off her low-heeled shoes and letting her feet sink comfortably in the luxurious pile of the cream-coloured carpet in her lounge. She went straight to the walnut sideboard next to the fireplace, poured herself a large brandy and took a healthy swig. It was expensive brandy, as smooth as the silk on her bed upstairs, but she still gasped a little as it went down. Coughing and catching her breath she took another sip, slower this time, and felt the warmth of it spread through her body. She crossed over to her curtains and pulled them shut, then switched on a couple of side lamps and dimmed the main light. A red light was blinking on the answerphone on top of the coffee table in front of an enormous, red, buffalo-hide sofa, something her ex-husband insisted they buy and she hadn't got round to replacing. Its overwhelming size was a constant reminder of him. She punched the play button on the answerphone. It was his voice again and her fingers tightened on her brandy glass, her knuckles white.

'Don't be like this, Helen. We need to talk. We need to sort things out.' His voice was calming, soothing. As though he were talking to one of his patients. 'Call me back. You don't want to make me angry.' And there was steel in his voice now. Unsheathed. Brutal.

She clicked the phone off, ignoring the blinking light that signalled there were many more messages.

She drained her brandy and then poured another, sipping at it as she looked at herself in the large, gilt mirror that was above the fireplace. She flicked her hair from side to side and ran her fingers softly through her thick tresses. It was honey-blonde again, the same colour as it had been at twenty-six when she had first met Paul. Not entirely her natural colour, but not far off it. He had asked her to change it in the early days and she had refused. But he had asked time and again, and by that time she had found herself falling in love with him. And it wasn't such a big deal, was it? Only a hair colour. She had dyed it a deep brunette, the colour he wanted. The colour of one of those women from the original Charlie's Angels. And she quite liked it at first. Made her look like a different person. Like putting on a mask. But the collar and cuffs hadn't matched he'd said. The curtains and the carpet. He thought he was so damned amusing. So he had made her shave her body hair. Shaved quite nude, just like he did himself. He had told her that it was for health reasons. She laughed drily as she remembered his words, but she knew better than that. It was because he thought it made his cock look bigger, that was the simple truth. The brandy was chasing away her nerves and replacing them with anger. How could she have been so wrong about a person? How could she have thought she loved him? He'd seemed so gentle with children, and she always thought that he wanted some of his own. That was one of the reasons why she married him. She'd always wanted a family and she had made that clear to any man who ever wanted to get serious with her. At the age of twelve she had known how many children she wanted and that hadn't changed since. She took another sip of her brandy and unconsciously rubbed her stomach as she looked down at the flickering flames roaring hungrily around the logs now.

It wasn't long after the honeymoon that the excuses started. It was always his career, a new posting, a promotion. Just as everything was settled and he promised they could start a family, he got offered something new. More money to pay for school fees, he had said, and it meant they had had to move to London. Then there was a new house to find, and to decorate and renovate. And the new job meant he had to focus on that so the family would have to wait for another short while. And that short while became a year and then another year. Then one day Helen realised she was well into her thirties and he was never going to change.

Except he did.

He became violent. She swallowed more of the brandy, its taste bitter in the back of her throat now. She felt a little disorientated, her eyes momentarily out of focus, and she suddenly felt hot, a little giddy. She put the back of hand on her forehead and it was damp with perspiration.

'Overdoing it on the brandy again?'

She spun around, her mouth open in shock, her arm dropping, spilling the brandy from her glass into the rich pile of the carpet.

'How did you get in?' Her voice trembled as she looked at the man in front of her.

'I always kept a spare key in the garden shed. If you didn't want me here you should have changed the locks.'

'Get out!' Helen screamed at him and threw the brandy glass. The man laughed as it missed him by five feet and smashed against her new Liberty-print wallpaper that she had always wanted but had never been allowed.

Paul Archer shook his head, the laughter in his eyes dying in an instant. 'Seems like you never learn, Helen. No matter how many lessons you're given, you never learn. But as someone once remarked… repetition is an excellent learning tool.'

Helen shook with terror as Paul Archer moved towards her. She tried to get away but she could only make a few steps towards the door and then her legs wouldn't move, her muscles useless, she felt her knees buckle and she slid, almost in slow motion, to the floor. She tried to get up but couldn't. She watched helpless as her ex-husband looked down on her as he took off his shirt, which he folded neatly and put on the sofa, then unbuckled his belt and lowered his trousers. She tied to move backwards but couldn't. She could barely scream as he stood above her naked, stroking himself with his right hand, hardening. Her eyes flicked to the right, to the broken brandy glass, lying against the wall. If she could just reach that she could take that smile off his face for good.

Delaney leaned against the wall in the small entrance to South Hampstead station watching the commuters as they spilled out of the lift and bustled for the exit. A couple of uniforms were waiting outside and Sally Cartwright stood next to Delaney looking at her watch. Across from them was the ticket office and station master's room. The door opened and an angry-looking man, with dark, wavy hair and an accent spooned with silver, glared across at them.

'Haven't you people got anything better to do?'

Simon Elliot, a police surgeon in his thirties, came out behind him and shook his head at Jack. He wasn't the one they were looking for. Delaney shrugged at the angry man with the posh voice and held his hands out apologetically.

'We're just doing a job here.'

'Your family must be very proud of you.'

The man walked off in a huff and Sally looked at her watch again.

'Keen to be somewhere, Constable?'

'Like I said earlier, we're having a drink a bit later. You're welcome to join us.'

Delaney looked at her deadpan. 'You know me, Sally. I don't drink during the week.'

'Just a bit of a headache was it this morning, sir? A migraine?'

'Along those lines.'

Delaney listened as another train pulled out of the tunnel many feet below, feeling the ground vibrate beneath his feet, and watched the indicator that showed another lift was on its way up. So far they had interviewed two of the three potential suspects identified by Valerie Manners and had no luck with either of them. Any resemblance to the flasher on the heath's southern common disappeared below buckle level.

Kate felt nauseous as she finished reading the statement. Helen Archer explaining in clinical detail the assault her ex-husband had made on her. No, not assault, she corrected herself mentally, the rape. As she read the clinical words she could picture all too clearly in her mind what had happened. Helen suspected that Paul Archer had laced her brandy with some sort of sedative, some kind of date-rape drug. But the levels hadn't been strong enough, clearly, as she could still remember what had happened. She had remembered being powerless as he had knelt beside her on the carpet, lifting her legs apart, raising her skirt, taking off her underwear and violating her as she tried desperately for her limbs to work again. And finally they had. As she recognised the telltale signs, the little mewing noises, the tightening of his buttocks, the widening of his eyes as he sucked his breath quickly in over his teeth, his wife had summoned enough strength to jerk his body sideways, off her and out of her and shuffled away like an injured crab as he jerked in spasm and came, spilling his seed into the carpet.

Evidence.

The lift doors opened and about thirty or so people came out into the small concourse that formed both the entrance and exit to Hampstead station. Delaney was relieved to see that their third suspect looked to be among them, although he could only see his curly, brown hair. He had his head down reading the Evening Standard, but he looked up as the group spilled though the lift doors. He was an IC1 male, in his early thirties, wearing a charcoal-grey suit and his eyes flashed with shock and then anger as he saw Delaney. They recognised each other almost immediately. Delaney knew he was not one of the men in the security footage that Valerie Manners had identified as a possible suspect. But he looked a little like him, even though his hair was far longer and curlier than it had been when Delaney had last seen him.

The man looked ahead, saw the uniforms chatting outside on the street and, panicking, he grabbed a young woman and shoved her straight at Delaney and Sally Cartwright then took off at a run, out of the exit and down the street, flashing past the uniforms.

Delaney left the detective constable to pick the young woman up and went after the man, shouting at the officers to follow as he raced up the street.

The man ahead shouldered past a couple of people waiting at the bus stop, the briefcase in his hand waving wildly as he ran pell-mell towards the road that led to the common and the southern reaches of the heath.

Delaney breathed heavily, his lungs on fire, feeling the muscles in his thighs burn as he hammered his legs down on the hard pavement. He swerved around the people waiting at the bus stop and shouted for the man to stop.

He didn't.

Delaney cursed through panted breath and picked his pace up. He was beginning to regret his two visits to Roy's burger van. A bacon sandwich or two is one thing going down, it's an altogether different thing coming up, and if he didn't catch the guy sprinting ahead of him soon he was either going to throw up or have a heart attack, probably both.

He spurted forward, blowing fast now. Christ on a bicycle he needed to do more exercise. He flicked his eyes heavenward in the slightest gesture of apology for the blasphemy of his thoughts then dived forward to rugby-tackle the man round his legs and bring him down hard on the pavement.

At school Delaney was considered a great prospect for the game. Natural speed combined with courage bordering on stupidity, a keen intelligence and the ability to read the play on the hoof made him a superstar of school rugby in his early teens. As he grew older and taller and filled out in the shoulders, he was not only playing with boys much older than himself, he was playing better than them. There was talk of national trials. But then, at the age of fifteen, Delaney discovered girls and his ambitions for glory on the muddy field were swapped for ambitions of a more comfortable kind, and certainly not of a team nature. He played his last game of rugby when he was eighteen years old and so it was more than twenty years since he'd practised the move.

He missed the man entirely.

Smashing down on to the cold, slick pavement he cried out and skidded forward like a clubbed seal on ice, his right shoulder wrenched out of its socket again, a recurring legacy of a motorcycle accident in his mid-twenties.

The man ahead turned back to look, the smile on his face and the smart remark on his lips quickly dying as Sally Cartwright charged up to him and, not bothering with the technical rules of the game Delaney had once played, tackled him high, wrapping her arm round his neck and pulling him violently to the ground. At Twickenham she might have got a yellow card, in South Hampstead she got a shout of encouragement from the two uniformed officers who followed closely behind and grabbed the man, pulled him roughly to his feet and cuffed him.

Delaney took a moment or two to catch his breath, his face like a satisfied shepherd's sunset.

'You all right, boss?'

Delaney got to his knees, his right arm dangling uselessly by his side, and looked up at Sally, who was grinning a little too broadly for his liking, and gasped hoarsely. 'I wore him out for you.'

'Course you did, sir.'

Delaney stood fully up, dusted the wet leaves from his trousers with his good hand and walked over to where the tackled man was watching him, amused.

'I take it you don't play for the London Irish, Delaney?'

'I play on the only team that counts, you little shite.'

The man winked at Sally and indicated Delaney. 'You get to an age and suddenly you can't perform, if you know what I mean.'

Sally smiled back. 'Oh yeah, and how's your performance been of late?'

'I've had no complaints, darling.'

Sally pretended to be surprised. 'Really? Only an elderly nurse we were talking to earlier said you could only manage to fly the flag at half mast this morning.'

The guy looked over at Delaney. 'What's she on about?'

Sally turned to her boss. 'Do you know him then, sir?'

Delaney nodded. 'This here is Andy Ware. Aka Chemical Andy. Small-time drugs dealer, full-time pain in the arse. The last time I saw him he had a skinhead haircut. Peroxide blond.'

'Yeah, well, you got to move with the times, haven't you? I do a lot of business with the brothers nowadays…' Correcting himself. 'Did a lot of business. All behind me now of course. I've gone legit.'

Sally looked him up and down, unimpressed. 'What's up then, Chemical? Couldn't you get hold of any Viagra? Or was it just too cold for you this morning?'

'The fuck are you talking about, woman?'

Sally gestured towards his groin. 'The little man, flashing it on the heath this morning, were you?'

'I haven't been flashing anything.' He swirled his hips. 'And let me tell you, there ain't nothing little about this baby.'

'What are you doing here, Andy?' Delaney cut him short.

'I live here. Last I knew that ain't a crime.'

'You caught the train just after eight this morning. What have you been doing all day?'

'Working. Like I say, I'm out of the life.'

'Working at what? Somehow I can't see you as an estate agent.'

'Like I give a fuck what you see me as.'

Delaney leaned in. 'We can do this down the nick if you prefer it?'

The man shrugged. 'Community service.'

'What?'

'With the CAB, helping people with their finances.'

Delaney turned to Sally. 'He's a semi-qualified accountant. Left university with a degree, a bad haircut and a habit.'

'Fuck the habit, I left university with fifteen thousand pounds' worth of student loans to pay off.'

Sally flashed him a less than sympathetic look. 'So, you're telling us you weren't flashing the wiener this morning.'

Chemical Andy flashed his teeth again and pumped his groin forward. 'I told you, sweet cheeks, this here ain't no chipolata. I'm talking jumbo sausage, darling, you bring your own sauce.'

Delaney glared at him. 'Just answer the question.'

'What, you serious? You think I'm some kind of pervert?'

Sally nodded. 'Yeah. We do. Why did you take off when you saw us otherwise?'

Andy Ware shook his head. 'Because I know the way you people work. You be putting something on me.'

His eyes slid sideways a little, not holding Delaney's gaze.

Delaney sighed and turned to Sally. 'Look in his briefcase.'

Andy Ware struggled futilely against the grip of the uniformed officers as Sally opened the case.

'No way, man. That's my private property. That's cold, man. You got no cause. You got no right.'

Sally opened the briefcase and pulled out several packs of white powder. 'And you got the right to remain silent.'

'Fuck that.'

'And the right to brag about the size of you hot dog to the boys of E Wing. I'm sure they'll have plenty of sauce for you.'

Delaney nodded to the uniforms. 'Take him to the car.'

The uniforms led him off cursing. Sally smiled and looked at Delaney. 'You think he's good for it?'

'Doubt it somehow.'

'So where does that leave us?'

Delaney let out a long painful sigh and let the pain show on his face. 'In need of a drink.'

'What's up, boss?'

'I've dislocated my shoulder.'

'Shall I take you down to the hospital?'

Delaney held his right hand out, wincing. 'Just take my arm, both hands, and hold it tight.'

'Sir?'

'Just do it, Sally.'

Sally, puzzled, did as she was asked.

Delaney took a quick, sharp breath then wrenched his shoulder, snapping it back into place. 'Jesus, Mary, and all the sweet saints!' He staggered backwards, Sally still clinging to his arm. 'All right, you can let go now.'

Sally released her grip and Delaney put his left hand against a lamp post.

'You all right, sir?

Delaney nodded at her, breathing deeply. 'You get off to the pub, I'll process laughing boy back at the factory.'

'You going to join us later?'

'Yeah, I reckon I've earned a pint today.'

'Or twenty.'

'You're getting the idea.'

He watched Sally walk away, waited until she had turned the corner then staggered to a bus shelter, leaning against it with his good arm, fighting hard not to throw up as he took great gulping breaths and waited for the agony in his shoulder to subside.

Kate closed Helen Archer's file and pushed it to the back of the desk as Caroline Akunin came into the room. 'When's the trial coming up?'

'A few days.'

'Not easy for her. Having to relive that all over again in court.'

Caroline sat opposite her and took her hands. 'How are you doing?'

Kate shook her head, blinking back tears.

'He's not going to get away with it.'

Kate gestured at the blue folder. 'How confident are the CPS on this?'

Caroline shrugged. 'As confident as they can be in these cases. There is physical evidence.'

'That he drugged her?'

'Not of that. But bruising. DNA. Semen secretions on the carpet.'

'So he'll go down for it? For her at least?'

'He claims it was consensual. That she said she regretted the split. She asked him round, they drank a lot of brandy and then made love on the carpet in front of the fire.'

'You're joking?'

'No. He admits it was rough sex, but entirely consensual. It's what you would expect him to say, Kate. You know that. If he is going to deny rape, then he has to play the consensual card, given the physical evidence.'

'So it's his word against hers?'

Caroline nodded sadly. 'Always is. That's why only six per cent of them get prosecuted successfully.'

The phone on Caroline's desk rang and Kate gestured towards it. 'You better get it.'

Caroline answered the phone. 'Hello. Speaking.' She listened for a while. 'Okay, thank you.'

He face was impassive but Kate could see something was worrying her as she hung up the phone. 'Bad news?'

'It's your blood work, Kate.'

'Go on.'

'There's no evidence of Rohypnol.'

'Which doesn't mean to say there wasn't any.'

'No, of course not. Depending on the strength of whatever it was he used, it could have been flushed through your blood and out of your system before the tests.'

'I know.'

'There's something else…' Caroline hesitated.

'What?'

'You're pregnant, Kate.'

Delaney pulled his car into the White City car park, and, as he stepped out of it, he had to shield his eyes from a bright light suddenly shining at him.

Melanie Jones from Sky News stepped forward, smiling like an evangelist, and looked over at the long-haired cameraman who had his video camera on his shoulder and pointed straight at the policeman as though to launch an RPG. 'We running?' she asked him.

The cameraman nodded and Melanie turned back to face Delaney. 'Melanie Jones, Sky News. What can you tell us, Detective Inspector Delaney, about the dead woman who was found on South Hampstead Heath this morning?'

Delaney was too long in the tooth to be caught on the back foot like that. 'It's an ongoing investigation, I'm afraid. I'm not in a position to comment at present.'

'Sky News has learned that there was mutilation of the body. Was this the work of a serial killer?'

'When we have information, we'll call a press conference.' He made the words a dismissal.

Melanie Jones called after him as he walked away. 'What is the significance of the belt buckle, Inspector?'

Delaney's turned back to look at her, his eyes hardened. 'I beg your pardon?'

'The Green Man belt buckle? What's so special about it?'

Delaney walked towards the police station entrance. 'Come with me.'

Melanie enjoyed matching her long stride to his. His reaction had pretty much told her that her source was genuine. The cameraman dropped his camera from his shoulder and followed at a more sedate pace. Delaney walked through reception and up to the security door. He quickly typed in the code on the small pad and opened the door. Melanie Jones walked through, but as the cameraman went to follow Delaney blocked his path. 'Not you.' He called across to the desk sergeant. 'Keep an eye on him for me, will you, Dave?

Slimline Matthews nodded tersely and came around from behind the desk, showing his massive frame. 'Sure thing, Jack.'

Delaney closed the door behind him.

'What the hell do you think you're doing?' The reporter's normally smooth voice had nothing honey-like about it any more.

'Come with me.' Delaney took her none too gently by the arm and marched her along the corridor. He opened the door to an interview room and pushed her into it, closing the door behind him and leaning against it. He crossed his arms. 'Start talking.'

'No, I won't start talking. Who the hell do you think you are?'

'My name is Jack Delaney. I'm a policeman.'

Melanie snorted. 'I know who you are, for fuck's sake, what I want to know is what the hell you think you're doing?'

'You kiss your mother with that mouth?'

Melanie took a deep breath and smiled, full wattage. 'I tell you what, let's go back outside, let my cameraman through and we'll do this properly.'

She walked up to the door but Delaney made no motion to move out of her way.

'You mentioned the buckle.'

'So?'

'So how did you know about it?'

'If you don't let me out of this room right now you'll have bigger problems to worry about than that.'

Delaney gripped her upper arm. She kept herself in very good condition, that much was clear, but she gasped as he tightened his grip. 'No details have been released about the belt buckle. Why don't you tell me how you know about it?'

Melanie met his gaze, unfazed. It was a long time since any man had scared her. 'How about you take your hand off the merchandise?'

Delaney released his grip. 'Believe me, whatever you've got to peddle, I'm not in the market for, honey.'

'I got a call. The belt buckle. He told me to ask you what belt buckles were for. He said it was a clue. Seems he was right.'

'Who was it?'

Melanie smiled. 'Back in the market, are we?

'Just answer the fucking question.'

'I don't know. Male voice, could be twenties, could be thirties.'

'You didn't get his number?'

Melanie shook her head. 'It was withheld. He said he was the artist responsible for this morning's installation piece on Hampstead Heath.'

'What else did he say?'

'He said you were obviously no student of art history so he was going to have to give you some more clues.'

'He actually mentioned me by name?'

'Yes.'

And that was it?'

'Just that and the belt buckle. He said he'd be in touch with me again.' Melanie rubbed her upper arm. 'This how you treat everyone who has information for you?'

'You came in here pointing a camera and looking for a story. Not exactly trying to be a model citizen.' Delaney moved away from the door but Melanie Jones did not try to leave.

'You have your job to do, Jack. I've got mine. You're smart?' She made it a question. 'You'll see how we can help each other here.'

Delaney shook his head. 'Like you helped Alexander Walker last month?'

Melanie tilted her head slightly, looking up at him. 'Is that what the attitude is all about?'

'He was a poster boy for the worst kind of corruption in the police and you wanted to make him a media celebrity.'

'We're both on the same side here, Detective Inspector. You got any children?'

'What's that got to do with anything?'

'Financial security, Jack…'

'Don't call me that.'

'For life. For you, for your family, for your children. The inside story on how you brought down Alexander Walker. And how you worked with me to bring down a serial killer.'

'He's not a serial killer. And I work with you the day Johnny Cash starts his comeback tour.'

Melanie Jones shook her head, deadly serious now. 'We have to work together, whether you like it or not, Detective Inspector. He's contacting me and this guy is a serial killer. You know it, I know it and, more importantly, he knows it.'

Delaney would have responded but the door burst open and Superintendent George Napier barrelled past him into the room. He smiled apologetically at the reporter.

'I am really sorry about this, Miss Jones.'

Delaney glared at him. 'With respect, sir. I am conducting an interview here.'

'No you're not, Delaney. Your interview is over.'

Melanie Jones brought the full force of her professional smile to bear. 'It's quite all right, Superintendent. The detective inspector and I were discussing the case.'

'It's not all right, Miss Jones. I will not have members of the press treated in such a cavalier fashion in my station. Your cameraman has told me how you were manhandled, Miss Jones.'

'A small misunderstanding.'

Delaney held his boss's gaze. 'No misunderstanding on my part, sir. I don't care if she's press, public or a member of the royal frigging family, she has information on an ongoing murder case then she gets treated just the same by me.'

Napier goggled at him. 'Have you listened to a word I have said, Inspector?'

Delaney smiled sardonically at Melanie Jones. 'I'm just doing my job, sir.'

'Wait outside, Delaney. I'll speak to you later.'

Delaney nodded pointedly at the reporter then walked out, closing the door loudly behind him, and took a moment to compose himself. He'd have liked to have gone back inside and slapped his boss but he knew what the consequences would be, and although in times recently past he wouldn't have much cared, right now he needed his badge and the authority it brought. He still had personal matters to take care of and his warrant card was going to help do just that.

He walked through to public reception area where the long-haired cameraman was watching him with a smug and amused expression on his face as he lounged against the counter. 'Your boss had a word with you, did he?'

Delaney walked up to him, the smile on his lips far from friendly. He grasped the camera out of his hands, slid the broadcast-quality Betacam tape out of it and put it in his jacket pocket.

The cameraman was outraged. 'You can't do that!'

Delaney ignored him and nodded at Dave. 'Napier will probably be looking for me in a minute.'

'Want me to tell him where you'll be?'

'Tell him I got called away. Urgent business.'

Dave smiled knowingly. 'Have one on me.'

Delaney cocked his finger at him, pulled an imaginary trigger and headed towards the entrance.

The cameraman called after him. 'Oi!'

Delaney ignored him, walking outside and closing the door behind him, silencing the cameraman's outraged protests.

He looked up at the sky and thought about what Melanie Jones had told him. The moon was low in the sky, leaking a sulphurous light over the dark car park; a few clouds scudded over it as he watched, throwing a shadow over his face, but his eyes still glittered.

Derek Watters had been a prison officer for twenty-two years and married for twenty-three. He had left school at the age of sixteen and worked in a number of different jobs over the next year or so, never really settling into any of them. But after walking into a recruiting office, he had decided that when he turned eighteen he was going to join the army. His mates threw him a big party at the local pub, the Roebuck, to celebrate his eighteenth and give him a bit of a send-off before he took the Queen's shilling. Derek's mates had all had a whip-round and organised for a strippergram as well. A girl whose real name was Audrey but was calling herself for the purposes of erotic entertainment Sergeant Sally Strict. She was nineteen, dressed in a policewoman's outfit and had breasts like coconuts, the young Derek Watters had thought. Heavy, full, magnificent. Exotic fruit indeed.

Derek had always been more of a headlamps than a bumper man, still was. And Audrey's headlamps on that night dazzled him. Literally. She'd made him walk around the pub on all fours barking like a dog and then given him eighteen lashes with a soft suede whip. One for each of his years. Then given him his birthday treat. She hadn't done a full strip, she was just a fun telegram girl she'd said. But she had gone topless and let him cradle his face in her ample bosom. It was the best night of Derek's life thus far.

It turned out that Audrey was a student, training as a nursery nurse. The strippergram work was just to help pay for her fees. Derek had taken her card and a couple of days later he'd finally sobered up and found the courage to call her up and ask her out on a date. To his delight she had said yes. And on the third date she'd taken him home to her digs at college. Donned the policewoman's uniform once again and then took it off for an audience of just one. Took it off very slowly. All of it this time. And if Derek had been happy before he was fit to burst now.

But that 'now' was twenty-three years ago, he thought bitterly as he trudged up past the hordes of office workers who were spilling down the short steps into Piccadilly Circus station. Twenty-three years ago; and three weeks after her strictly non- Metropolitan Police regulation knickers had hit the floor of her eight foot by eight foot bedroom, he had got the phone call. He was having Sunday dinner at his parents' at the time, roast pork and parsnips, thinking life didn't get much better. No, it got worse.

Audrey was up the stick, he was the father, and his plans for joining the army were right in the shitter.

She wouldn't hear of him joining up. She wanted him home with her, not swanning off overseas whenever Maggie wanted to win another election. She wanted them to get married as soon as possible, and it wasn't just one baby she wanted, it was three. And there was no way she was walking up the aisle looking like Alison Moyet with a pillow stuffed under her jumper. Derek wasn't even thinking about marriage let alone a family but abortion was out of the question, seemingly. Audrey had her way; they got married and had three kids. Derek's application to join the police force was turned down and he ended up in the prison services. And the worst of it was, she refused to wear the uniform ever again. After her third baby her stomach had thickened and her back broadened and her once coconut-like breasts were now like flabby pumpkins that were long past their Halloween best.

So, he was going to put the touch on the copper and his CID mate. The information he had should be worth a couple of C notes and he was going to put the money to good use. A feisty little Irish tart he liked to visit when he had enough folding squirrelled away.

He smiled to himself as he pulled out his mobile phone and stood outside Boots on the north side of Piccadilly Circus, turning the collar of his raincoat up as the wind had freshened. There was moisture in the chill air. An hour ought to do it, he figured. Give him time to get some cash from DI Jimmy Skinner, a couple of drinks to set the ball rolling and then round to the auburn-haired strumpet for another round of Sergeant Strict and the love truncheon. He punched in the number and grinned expectantly.

Delaney took a sip of his Guinness and wended his way through the crowd at the Pig and Whistle over to a back table where Sally Cartwright and a bunch of other people were sitting, He nodded to some of them, all uniform, all fresh-faced and eager. Cops really were getting younger these days, he thought.

'Glad you could make it, sir.' Sally pulled out a chair for him. 'I think you know most people.'

'Sure.'

Delaney nodded generally and shifted uncomfortably in his seat, the pain in his shoulder throbbing and reminding him that his own youth was far behind him. He took another pull of his Guinness. Creamy analgesic by the pint glass.

Sally gestured at the young, black constable. 'This is Danny Vine.'

'Nice to meet you again, sir.'

Delaney flashed him a quick smile as he shook his hand, pain lancing into his shoulder and making him regret it. 'Please don't call me sir. Not in here, anyway.'

'Sure.'

'And this is Michael Hill.'

She smiled at the blond-haired man in his mid-twenties. Delaney picked up the slight catch in her voice and the sparkle in her eye. Danny Vine had competition. He nodded at the man, not risking another handshake. He recognised him from somewhere, but couldn't quite place him. 'I know you?'

'You'd have seen me earlier, sir.'

'Like I said, no sirs. When you're out of uniform I'm just plain old Jack Delaney.'

'I'm not uniform.'

'Oh?'

'I'm the police photographer.'

Delaney nodded a little guiltily. 'Sure, I thought I recognised you.' The truth was he hardly noticed any of the myriad support staff when he was working. Especially if they were all kitted out in white spacesuits. Some detective.

'Any developments on the case, Inspector?' Danny Vine asked. He was clearly eager to show he was keen. Sally had better look out, Delaney reckoned. Youth and energy were dangerous enough, particularly when you added testosterone to the mix.

'Nothing new. We'll track down who she is tomorrow with any luck. Give us somewhere to start.'

'How are you going to do that?'

Michael Hill this time. Delaney sensed that they weren't really interested in talking to him per se, but thought that if they got on his good side they'd get on the good side of Sally Cartwright.

He was relieved to see Bob Wilkinson coming in and heading up to the bar. He smiled apologetically at Sally. 'Sorry, got to have a word with Bob.'

Sally nodded back distractedly but Delaney could tell she had other matters on her mind. Young love, he thought as he worked his way back through the noisy hubbub, God and all his angels save us from it.

'Inspector.'

'Get us a pint, Bob, for Christ's sake.'

Bob smiled at the barmaid and jerked his thumb at Delaney. The barmaid, a button-nosed temptress called Angela something, Delaney never could remember, grinned at him as she poured a fresh pint of Guinness. 'Shot with that, Jack?'

'No. Being a good boy tonight.'

Angela laughed, a throaty, husky laugh that started somewhere low. 'Can't see that somehow.'

Delaney winked at her. 'Turning over a new leaf. Jack Delaney. Modern man.'

'Yeah, you and Hugh Hefner.' She put the pint on the counter. 'Let it settle and if you want a top-up give me a whistle.' She moved off to serve some others at the end of the bar. Her hips swinging like a Tennessee two-step.

Bob looked at Delaney watching her. 'They reckon if a woman swings her hips like that, she isn't ovulating.'

Delaney looked back at him. 'That a fact?'

'Mine of them, me. Fuck police work, I should have been a black-cab driver.'

Delaney couldn't be bothered to wait for the Guinness to settle properly and took a long gulp. 'Got a stupid question for you, Bob?'

'Shoot?'

'What's a belt buckle used for?'

Bob Wilkinson shrugged. 'Well, in the good old days it would be used to keep your women and children in line.' He grinned. 'Nowadays just to keep your dignity, and your trousers up.'

'Yeah.' Delaney nodded.

Bob frowned. 'Why do you ask that?'

Delaney shrugged and immediately regretted asking Bob the question. 'I have no idea.' He took another pull on his drink and as he put the pint down on the bar and gestured to Angela for a top-up, his mobile phone rang. Irritated, he pulled it out from his pocket but his expression changed as he saw who was calling.

'Delaney.'

'Jack, it's Kate.'

'I saw. What's up?'

'I need to talk to you.'

'What about?'

The large group at the bar started singing loudly. Kate said something on the other end of the line but Delaney couldn't catch it. 'Hang on, Kate, I'll take it outside.'

Angela watched him, puzzled, as he walked towards the exit. She picked up Delaney's unfinished pint. 'Does he want this or not?'

Bob grinned at her. 'I may be the fount of all wisdom, darling, but what I am not, is a psychic.'

'No, what you is, is an arsehole.'

Bob nodded with a self-satisfied grin and took a sip of his pint. Some things you couldn't argue with.

Jimmy Skinner liked coming to Soho for very different reasons to the prison officer from Bayfield Prison. Jimmy had two vices. One was Internet poker and the other was Scotch. Unlike Delaney, however, he didn't drink it like lemonade. He treated himself every now and again with a small glass when he had won a high stakes game. He never drank when he was playing. That way disaster lay. You played the odds, you trusted the maths. What you didn't do was get drunk and risk all on chance, on the vagaries of the turn of a card. Lady luck was for losers.

Soho had a couple of great places to shop for the whisky connoisseur. One was on Old Compton Street and the other was on Greek Street. Just down from a bookshop specialising in spanking magazines and one of the entrances to the Pillars of Hercules, which was why he was more than happy with where Derek Watters had suggested they meet.

He stepped out of the whisky shop, pleased with himself. In his carrier bag a bottle of Johnny Walker Blue Label. A blended whisky but at one hundred and sixty pounds it wasn't the kind of stuff you found on special offer in the alcohol aisle of Tesco's. It wasn't about the money for Jimmy Skinner, it was about the victory. And victory always deserved to be marked, in his opinion.

He looked up at the narrow, black clouds scudding across an already dark and crimson sky then suddenly down again as he heard the sound of an engine screaming in high revs and the concurrent sound of tyres screeching on tarmac. He looked up the street and the carrier bag in his right hand slid from his open fingers. The bottle inside it hit the pavement hard and smashed. But Jimmy Skinner didn't register it all. He was too busy shouting, straining his lungs in the face of the gusting wind.

'Look out!'

But for Derek Watters as he spun round to the sound of the tortured engine, it was too late. Far too late.

The jet-black Land Rover Discovery hit into him still accelerating. The bull bar on the front of it crushed his ribs, splintering them and piercing his heart before the front of his head smashed down onto the bonnet. He was thrown back into the street as the driver stamped on the brakes and then into reverse, the tyres biting and screaming once more. As Jimmy Skinner ran across the road the back of Derek Watters head slapped hard down on the road with the crunching sound of a coconut being cracked by a hammer.

The Land Rover roared backwards into Soho Square, then drove round the green and, accelerating once more, shot up Soho Street and out into the busy traffic of Oxford Street, oblivious to the blaring of horns and sudden screeching of brakes, and disappeared as it turned left heading towards Marble Arch. Skinner watched it go, trying to see the number plate, but it had been taped over. He knelt down and put his fingers to Derek Watters's carotid artery on the side of his neck, though it was a movement made more by instinct than expectation. But, surprisingly, the prison officer had one last breath in him. As his eyes clouded over he looked at the tall, thin, bone-faced policeman kneeling beside him and sighed more than spoke: 'Murder.'

Then his eyes froze, motionless, and Derek Watters, forty-one years old, who never got to serve his country by bearing arms, died on a chill, wet street in a city that had a heart as cold as a solar system where the sun had died out many millennia ago.

Delaney sat behind the wheel of his car taking a moment to collect his thoughts. Adjusting the rearview mirror he looked at himself. He didn't know what had got Kate Walker so agitated, she wouldn't tell him on the telephone, just told him to meet her at the Holly Bush pub in Hampstead. He knew it well enough, it was just up the road from his new house. What he didn't know was what had got her so rattled; he could hear it in her voice, the thinnest form of politeness covering someone close to breaking point. It had something to do with what happened in the hospital car park that morning, he'd bet his life on it. Whatever it was that had gone down, the clear fact was that Kate needed his help. She didn't say it in so many words, but it was expressed in her barely restrained emotion. She needed his help. And that was the one thing Jack Delaney couldn't walk away from.

He'd put the mirror back in position, switched the engine on and slipped the gearstick into first, when his phone rang. He angrily slipped the gear back into neutral, glanced at the cover of his phone and snapped it open.

'Make it quick.'

'Jack. It's Jimmy Skinner.'

Kate Walker sat at the long wooden bar in the Holly Bush. Comforted on the one hand to be surrounded in the warmth and hubbub of familiar faces and voices of the early-evening crowd, and yet starting every time the front door opened. She wanted it to be Delaney coming through that door but was terrified of the notion that it would be Paul Archer walking in instead. She didn't know what made her suggest this pub to Delaney. She wasn't thinking straight. Hadn't been since she had woken up this morning to find that man in her bed. She took a sip at her Bloody Mary. Cautiously. She had no intentions of getting hammered again tonight; besides, she was pregnant. God knows what she was going to do about that. And maybe she hadn't been raped. Maybe she was blowing things all out of proportion. She certainly had drunk a lot last night, maybe they had gone back to her flat, got paralytic and just passed out in bed. But if that was the case, why couldn't she remember any of it?

She looked at her watch again. Where the bloody hell was Jack Delaney? It had taken all her nerve to call him in the first place and if he stood her up now, leaving her alone at the bar like a jilted teenager, she would kill him. She downed her Bloody Mary and gestured at the barman for another. After all, two wouldn't hurt. Would they?

The ambulance pulled away from the kerb and drove slowly down Greek Street towards Shaftesbury Avenue. It had no need for sirens and lights. The police cars that had cordoned off the area, blocking traffic from Soho Square, Bateman Street and Manette Street, pulled away too. Nothing to see here either. Not any more, at least. Delaney leaned back against the painted glass of the porno bookshop and put a cigarette in his mouth. He held the packet out to Skinner who shook his head then lit the cigarette with a lazy scrape of a match.

He inhaled deeply and looked up at the night sky. It was like a carmine canvas that an artist had dragged thick, soot-stained fingers across. Like the black fingers of blood that had crept along the cobbles where Derek Watters had been murdered. He exhaled a thin stream of smoke and looked back at his colleague.

'Definitely not an accident?'

Jimmy Skinner shook his head.

'Professional hit?'

'I'd say so. The guy didn't have a chance. Walking along the street when suddenly out of nowhere… Bang!' Skinner slapped one hand hard against the other.

Delaney took another thoughtful drag on his cigarette. 'And that was all he said. The one word.'

'Yeah. "Murder." Hardly the most insightful final utterance, seeing as I had just watched him being splattered halfway up Greek Street.'

'What's going on, Jimmy?'

Skinner shrugged drily. 'Looks like somebody doesn't want anyone talking to you.'

Delaney nodded in agreement. 'Looks like.'

'I'd watch your back, if I were you, Jack. Somebody going to all this trouble, easier maybe to just take you out.'

A cloud cleared the moon, throwing for a moment a spill of yellow light that reflected in the black orbs of Delaney's eye.

He threw his cigarette on to the road, the sparks flaring briefly then dying out as he crushed it under heel. 'Maybe.'

Kate sipped on her third or fourth drink. She wasn't drunk, just couldn't remember how many she had had. Time passes in a different way when you're lost in thought. No matter what Einstein said, some things aren't relative. She tasted the fluid in her mouth, thin and liquid and she realised that all she was drinking was melted ice, any vodka in the glass long since gone. She rattled the glass and held it out to the barman, who refilled it and added the drink to her tab. She swirled it in her hand, watching the splash of red wine, which the Holly Bush always added to a Bloody Mary, spin like a star system in a universe of its own. Like a black hole. Like the eye of Sauron.

Some time later she looked at the oak-framed mirror above the bar and could see the front door to the pub opening and a man with curly dark hair entering and her heart pounded suddenly in her chest and she struggled to breathe. She knew the symptoms. It was a panic attack. And being the doctor that she was, Kate knew that sometimes panic was absolutely the appropriate response.

A single, skeletal leaf was cartwheeling along the road. It was a dry, brittle, frail thing and it came to rest, finally, in the damp gutter that was already clogged with the decomposing corpses of leaves from the semi-denuded trees that lined the street. A street of wealthy people, whose lives behind the closed oak doors and wrought-iron gates were consumed with problems other than mortgages and council tax or the National Health Service. This was a street of financiers, of publishers, of authors and literary agents, of property developers and quantity surveyors, of Harley Street doctors and surgeons… and of a forensic pathologist who had, just that very day, sickened of death, and handed in her notice. The man in a car across the road from her house didn't know that, however, and it wouldn't have made any difference if he had. Her job, after all, had brought her to his attention in the first place.

He looked down at the pointed toe of his cowboy boot as it rested on the accelerator pedal and was glad he had gone for the snakeskin rather than the leather option. He could relate to snakes. The ability to move silently and unseen. The ability to shed one's skin. The ability to bare one's teeth and terrify. He smiled to himself humourlessly, and the light from the watching moon lent his teeth a cast the colour of old ivory. He looked across once more at the empty house and waited.

Hunters knew how to wait after all.

Jennifer Cole looked at the images on her Macbook laptop with professional detachment. A woman in a corset wearing old-fashioned seamed stockings and posing like a Vargas pin-up come to life. She was a full breasted woman in her late twenties, her bee-stung lips painted red with a hint of purple, the tip of her tongue visible and wet with promise, the pupils in her dark painted eyes wide with desire. She wasn't making love to the camera, she was fucking it. Jennifer flicked through the next pictures, some in uniform, some topless, some in elegant lingerie from Agent Provocateur. The burlesque look was very popular at the moment. A hint of goth, a hint of forbidden pleasure. Pain and pleasure, sugar and spice. She spent a lot of money on her lingerie and the photos that she used to update her webpage at least once a month. She probably didn't have to do it so often, but the truth was she enjoyed the ritual of it. The costumery and the perfumes, the candlelight and the moonlight. The black and red satin sheets. The artistry.

It had been a long time since Jennifer Cole had needed the money she made from her services. She had got into it, as most did, from need. But that need had passed. She was selective now too. She didn't work every night and was extremely choosy about her clients. After all, that was the main thrill for her, the power she felt. She didn't feel degraded or used, just the opposite. It was her decision, her choice to make. And it was never something she regretted. She knew about the human body, how it functioned, how it was put together, what parts needed maintenance. Sex was just part of that. And it was fun.

She flicked forward to the last of the images. She was wearing a long fur coat that she had bought on a cruise trip to the Norwegian fjords one year. The real thing, never mind the paint-throwing hypocrites with their leather belts and shoes. It was mink, thick and luxurious. Her hair was piled high on her head with silver threads adorning and confining it. She wore silver boots with high platform soles and heels. The coat was open, her breasts jutting with the pride of the goddess Diana, her sex cupped in the sculptured, rounded vee of a silk thong, and in her right hand a long, silver-handled riding crop.

Her small silver mobile phone rang and she answered it slowly, patting her hair as she looked at herself in the mirror. Her pupils widened as she licked her lips and purred.

'Hello. How may I help you?'

If she'd been a cream cake, she would have eaten herself.

'Angelina. It's me.'

Angelina, her stage name as she liked to think of it, had been taken from an early American feminist hero of hers, Angelina Grimké, and not, as some had assumed, after the famous actress. She looked at the photo of herself holding a crop and thought it must have been an omen of sorts that he should have called just then. 'Hello, bad boy. How have you been?'

There was a pause, then his voice, husky with desire. 'I don't think Santa is going to have me on his nice list this Christmas.'

'You've been naughty?'

The voice on the other end was breathy. 'Ooh, yeah.'

She could hear the need. 'I hope you're not being naughty right now?'

'Not just yet.'

'You want to come and confess to a superior mother?'

'Not today.'

'Oh?'

'I want you to come to me.'

'It's going to cost more.'

'I don't mind paying. Bad men pay for their sins, don't they? Sooner or later we all pay.'

'If they know what's good for them.'

'I know what's good for me.'

Jennifer Cole had only met the man recently. He had visited her a couple of times at her flat in Chalk Farm but she recognised the soft burr in his voice and knew one thing for sure: he was good-looking with kinky tastes. Just her kind of man. She didn't do this to pay the rent, after all.

'Where do you want to meet?'

'I thought we could go for a drink first.'

'It's your dollar, babe. You spend it how you want.'

'That's what I want.'

'Where?'

'Camden?'

'Sure. Tell me when and where.' She listened then hung up the phone and looked at her picture on her laptop again. Only the hair colour was wrong. Her midnight cowboy liked brunettes. She picked a wig off a stand and slipped it over her head. She stood up and picked up the long riding crop from one of her bedside cabinets and gave it a swishing flex in the air. She slammed the crop down hard on the bed with a satisfying thud and smiled. Christmas was coming early to Camden.

Hampstead was huddled against the weather. The scudding clouds had taken on weight and mass now, and although the wind still blew at a constant rate the swollen sky above was black and unbroken. The air was cold and threaded with moisture. Delaney looked up at the night sky, the moon now hidden behind the low wall of cloud that hung over the spread city like a biblical judgement. It shouldn't be so dark this early at this time of year, he thought as he looked at the entrance to the pub, deliberated for a second or two and then tapped a cigarette from a crumpled packet into his hand and searched through his pockets for his matches. The scent of the perfume Opium suddenly filled his nostrils and he realised a woman had come up to stand beside him. She was in her late twenties in a fake-fur coat and was holding a lighter out to him. Delaney was taken aback for a moment then leaned forward so she could light his cigarette.

'Thanks.'

'Not a problem.'

Her voice had the lyrical smoothness of the confident rich, one whose education had eschewed affectation.

Just like Kate's.

The woman closed her lighter and Delaney wondered why someone such as her would approach him, but then realised as the woman walked away and joined her friends that the gesture was just one of solidarity, of friendship. The fraternity of smokers in exile, gathered in groups outside every pub and bar throughout the country, united by the stigma of nicotine.

The woman's friends laughed a little and whispered something to her. She turned to look back at him curiously and Delaney realised he had been staring. He looked away and sipped some smoke from his cigarette into his mouth, then drew it deep so that it burned his lungs. Delaney was sure he saw something akin to pity in the young woman's eyes and the thought of it stung more than the hot smoke. What the hell was he thinking of, buying a house in an area like this? He looked at the window of the pub behind him, bright with colour and noise, he looked through it at the shining faces with smiles full of porcelain, and voices ringing with the confidence of a golden future. He looked at the fashionable ties and slicked-back hair, at the Barbour jackets and coloured, corduroy trousers, and he thought of the dark-haired woman who waited for him at the bar and who fitted in among that crowd like a Hunter Wellington at the Chelsea Flower Show. He told himself he hadn't moved to be near her. It was to be near his daughter and his sister-in-law and her family. But as he ground out his cigarette on the cold slate beneath his feet, he realised the biggest sin was lying to yourself. The trouble was that, contrary to received opinion, the truth did not set you free. Sometimes the truth was an iron cage of your own fashioning.

He walked through the door, the sounds and chatter around him muted somehow, the light a softness like warmth as he threaded through the crowd and saw her waiting for him at the bar.

'Hello, Jack.'

He could see in her eyes that the drink she held in her hand was not her first. But her gaze was steady and the warmth of her breath was sweet. Her lips had been stained by the tomato juice and Delaney wanted nothing more than to put his arm around her alabaster shoulder and kiss her.

Instead he pulled over a stool, sat beside her and gestured to the barman. 'Another one here please, and I'll have a large…' He hesitated for a moment. 'I'll have a large Bushmills. Straight up. No ice, no spittle.'

Kate handed her drink over to the barman. 'Vodka tonic please.' She smiled at Delaney. 'You can only drink so much tomato juice.'

'Of course.'

Delaney waited for her to say more but Kate turned her attentions back to the barman and handed Delaney his drink when it arrived. He took a sip of his whiskey and before he could ask her why she had wanted to see him, Kate spoke.

'I'm pregnant, Jack.'

And for the second or third time in his life the world rocked on its axis. Kate was saying something else but Delaney couldn't hear it. All he could hear was the blood pounding in his temples. He took another sip of his drink and tried to catch her words but failed. 'I'm sorry?' he managed at last.

'It's not a question of anybody being to blame, Jack.'

'No, that's not what I meant. I meant I didn't hear the rest of it.'

'I don't know what the rest of it is, Jack. That's what I'm saying. I don't know what to think, I just wanted you to know, that's all. And I didn't want to tell you on the telephone.'

Delaney nodded, still taking it in. 'I'm the father?'

Kate looked at him, trying to read his eyes, cursing herself for drinking too much again and clouding her judgement. 'Yes, Jack. You're the father.'

'I see.'

Kate took another swallow of her drink. 'Is that it?'

'I don't know, Kate.' He shrugged. 'What was that business this morning, in the hospital car park?'

Kate shook her head, the colour drained out of her face and Delaney couldn't work out if it was through fear or through anger. 'This has got nothing to do with him.'

'If he's hurt you in some way, I want to help.'

Kate had to fight back the tears but she was damned if she was going to let him see her cry. 'You're a knight in shining armour, are you, Jack?'

'Hardly, but I could see something was wrong. I can be a friend, can't I?'

Kate pushed her glass away and stood up a little unsteadily. 'You know what, this was a bad idea. We have to talk, but not now.'

She picked her coat up off the back of her chair and would have walked away but Jack held her arm, gently, as he stood up himself. He looked into her eyes and could see the need in them as naked as a flame. He wanted to wrap her in his arms and hold her and tell her that he was there for her in every way that she wanted. But the visions of the dead man in Greek Street and the comatose body of Kevin Norrell held him back. The violence visited upon his wife four years ago was still a force loose in his world, a force that he could neither identify nor control. So in that moment, between breathing and speaking, as he looked into Kate Walker's eyes, he knew that the past still had a grip on him as tight as the clasp of a drowning man. He could not offer Kate the emotional lifeline she so clearly needed. 'Let me know what you decide.'

Kate looked at him, the hurt sparking in her eyes. He wished he could kiss it away, but he knew, also, that the kind of pain she was feeling took a lifetime of disappointment to build, and its healing was way beyond the small amelioration provided by such short-lived gestures.

'Fuck you, Jack.' She brushed his arm aside and walked quickly to the door. Delaney let her go. Turning back to the bar again and looking at his reflection in the mirror hanging on the wall behind the counter, he felt his face burning with shame.

Outside, Kate made no effort to hold back the tears that were now streaming down her face. What had she expected of the man after all? She'd had no illusions, no dreams that the fact of her pregnancy would drive him begging for forgiveness into his arms. What had she expected of him then? The truth was that she didn't know, but the cold reality of the encounter was too much for her to bear. He wanted to be friends, he wanted her to let him know what she decides! Christ, if she had had a shotgun in her hands right then she would have cut him in half with it. She dashed the back of her right hand across her eyes. What the hell had she been thinking? She should have known Delaney would be as emotionally available as a piece of the frozen Donegal turf or wherever it was he came from. But the trouble was she knew exactly what she was thinking, even if she hadn't been honest with herself. She wanted to tell him all about Paul Archer, about what she thought he had done to her. She wanted to tell him everything and she wanted him to take care of it for her. She wanted him to fold her in his arms and tell her that he loved her. How stupid was that? She wiped her hand across her eyes and crossed the road, barely registering the horn blaring from a passing car that had to swerve to miss her. She hated herself for being so weak and formed a fist of her right hand. If she had to do it all on her own then that was how it was going to be. Damn Delaney. Damn all men, if it came to that. Kate Walker had been her own woman for thirty-odd years and she wasn't about to let that change now. She took a deep breath and wiped her eyes dry. She knew what she was going to do.

Delaney finished a second whiskey in five minutes. He looked at his watch. He should never have let Kate go off on her own like that, she deserved to know what was going on. He had no intention of letting the matter of Kevin Norrell drop. Norrell had something to tell him that would lead him to his wife's killers. Derek Watters's murder proved that much. He had never bought the idea that the attack on Kevin Norrell was just some sort of rough justice in prison. Kevin Norrell was an ignorant, ill-bred, psychopathic Neanderthal with as much conscience as a rabid stoat, but he wasn't a nonce. Delaney was pretty sure about that. So that meant the attack on Norrell and Watters's murder was to stop them both from getting information to him. He should have told Kate that. She would have understood. But her revelation that she was pregnant had taken him completely by surprise. He needed to talk to her. He finished his glass and considered for a moment as the barman gestured to see if he wanted another. He shook his head and headed for the door.

It took Delaney a matter of minutes to reach Kate's house. He crossed the road and looked up at the windows. There were no lights on. It had been ten minutes since she had stormed out of the pub. She should definitely be home by now. He hated to think of her in there alone with the lights out, curled up on her sofa sobbing. He walked up to the door and rang the bell. After a short while he rang it again, but there was no answer. He banged his fist on the door a few times and called her name out but still there was no answer.

'Come on, Kate. If you're in there open the door. We need to talk. Jeez, I know I've been a prick, just let me talk to you.'

Apart from a curtain twitching in her neighbour's property there was no response. He glanced at his watch and then looked up the road. There was no sign of her. He took out his mobile and quickly tapped in her name. After a few rings her voice on an answerphone cut in asking him to leave a message. He hesitated and then closed the phone. He hated leaving messages and what could he say anyway? He looked up once more at the dark windows. If Kate was at home she clearly wasn't ready to talk to him just yet. He pulled his overcoat closed and set off back down the road. He was tempted to keep going as he neared his new house, keep going further down the hill and then turn right into the Richard Steele pub. Take the prescription in iron-rich Guinness and amber measure, repeat as necessary, but for the first time in a very long while he realised he didn't want to be alcohol-numbed; he knew he was going to need a clear head about him.

He took his key out of his pocket, opened his front door, and went inside.

The scream was cut off very quickly. His hand was around her throat like the strike of a snake. Silencing her to a barely audible gurgle of horrified panic. The sound a kitten might make if you held it under muddy bathwater. Her legs kicked weakly and she felt a sharp pain in her neck. She gasped, fighting for breath, and reached out her right hand, snaggling her fingers in his thick curly hair, but before she could clench her hand and pull, the power seemed to drain from her muscles. Her body flopped like a marionette with its strings cut. He moved forward catching the droop of her body on his chest. She could feel the hardness of his prick as he pressed excitedly against her. Then the lights seemed to dim, she fought to blink her eyes open but, like her leg muscles, they refused to respond. She looked down, drool from her mouth falling to drop on the toe of his snakeskin cowboy boots. She felt a warmth rise from her lower body as though she were being lowered slowly into a very warm bath and then she was aware of nothing at all.

Paul Archer paused for breath, the sweat running down his forehead into his eyes and forcing him to blink. His breathing was ragged, gasping as much for oxygen as with desire. The woman on all fours beneath him was breathing hard too, whimpering, although he could make out no words, the gag he had tied made pretty sure of that. He placed his strong hands on either side of her perfectly shaped buttocks, raising them up to cup her waist and, positioning himself again, began to thrust deep into her, with the relentless and perfunctory rhythm of a gardener using a trowel to dig into hard earth. Stabbing at her. Her breathing was harder now, a yelping sound coming with every thrust, her luxuriant, dark hair flicking with the movement. Archer smiled coldly. Turn and turn about. He wasn't a misogynist, though he had been called one many times. He didn't despise women, he loved them, in fact, especially those that knew their place. And if they didn't, well, he enjoyed teaching them it.

A trickle of sweat ran down his nose and he released one hand to wipe it, wincing as a fresh stab of pain came with the movement. He gripped the woman's body again, not caring if he hurt her as he dug his fingers in and pulled her towards him. He had paid for his pleasures after all, hadn't he? Paid in so many ways.