Lowly police constables did not buy flats in Notting Hill. Not unless they had money and influence, both things she'd worked hard at denying since childhood.

But things would never be the same if she were found out. Oh, they couldn't fire her outright, that would cause a scandal greater than her presence. But she would be quietly pulled from the more sensitive jobs, and there would be no possibility of promotion, not even to some isolated hamlet in Outer Mongolia. There would be jeers and whispers in the canteen, conversations that would stop when she entered the room, and she would never again be one of the mates.

The lift stopped and Melody stood for a moment, blinking in the light of the corridor, before taking the last few steps to her door.

The flat looked just as neat and tidy as she had left it, radio on, Classic FM playing quietly in the background for company. Not neat and tidy, she corrected herself. Sterile.

For once, she kicked off her shoes haphazardly and tossed her coat over the arm of the sofa. Barefoot, she padded to the corner bay window that overlooked Portobello Road. No sound rose from the street. It was past closing and even the pubs were quiet.

It was too bad, Melody thought, that she hadn't fancied Doug Cullen, the little swot, because she suspected that she just might have encountered someone as lonely as she was.

Gemma made the drive to Leyton on autopilot. It was a good deal farther than it had been when she'd lived in her friend Hazel's garage flat in Islington, and there was no easy route. She wound her way through the quiet streets, north, then west, skirting Willesden, Hampstead, then Camden Town, all the while her mind revolving in tight little circles of denial. Not her mother, dear God, not her mother. It just wasn't possible.

Kincaid had argued with her about going to hospital, of course, told her there was nothing she could do tonight, that her father hadn't wanted her to go.

How like her dad, to have trekked halfway across London rather than to have rung her. He'd wanted to confront her, she suspected, to let her know that he felt what had happened to her mother was somehow her fault.

That had stung, but it wasn't her brief flare of temper at her dad's pigheadedness that had sent her flying across London, but panic, and a wash of guilt. How could her mother have been ill and she not known?

She had seen her just a few weeks ago-or had it been longer? Time flew, work and the children kept her busy, and then when she did visit, it was to contend with her father's silent pall of disapproval. But these were all excuses that seemed flimsy and selfish now.

Leyton slid by, the streets of her childhood suddenly painfully familiar, and then she was entering the grounds of Whipps Cross University Hospital. The silhouettes of the late-Victorian buildings loomed fittingly massive against the pink glow cast by the ever-present city lights.

She had been born here, as had Toby, as had her sister and her sister's children, not to mention much more noteworthy personages such as David Beckham and Jonathan Ross. But even they were minor footnotes to all the births and deaths this place had seen in the last century.

Familiarity with the complex allowed Gemma to park and find her mother's ward easily enough, and there she found her sister as well. Cyn was sound asleep, sprawled across three chairs in the waiting area, her red-gold hair tumbled back like a drowning Ophelia's, her tanned midriff showing, tropical-pink toenails peeking coyly from beneath the hem of her jeans. Trust Cyn to look fetching in even the worst of circumstances, Gemma thought with a burst of irritation, but then her sister emitted a faint snore and Gemma sighed. Cyn was Cyn, after all, but she could at least have rung. She had probably been enjoying her role as the good sister too much-or perhaps, Gemma thought more charitably, she'd just been too worried.

She'd meant to wake her sister, but decided to let Sleeping Beauty lie and speak to the charge nurse instead.

Her heart quickened as she entered the ward itself. The bright lights of the corridor couldn't combat the dead-of-night silence, the sense she always felt at such times in such places of life hanging by a thread.

But the charge nurse, a slightly tubby Pakistani man, was cheerful enough, and was willing to bend the rules and allow her into her mother's room. "Anything for London 's finest," he said, with an assessing stare that meant she probably didn't measure up to her sister.

"About my mum, do you know anything at all?" she asked, hesitantly, not sure she was ready for an answer.

"Waiting for blood tests, love," was all he would say. "It's just down on the right. You can sit with her as long as you're quiet."

The cubicle was dark except for the bluish fluorescent light burning above the bed. Her mum looked oddly small and withered against the starched white sheets, and Gemma noticed for the first time that her mother's red curls were fading to gray. An IV line snaked from a shunt in her hand to the standing pole at the head of the bed, but otherwise there were no wires or tubes, no indication that Vi Walters's universe had been turned on its head.

Her eyes were closed, her forehead creased in a slight frown, as if sleeping were an effort. When, Gemma wondered, had she last seen her mother in repose? Her mum was always busy, always doing, the only respite she allowed herself the occasional cup of tea in the small kitchen of the flat above the bakery. Sometimes, after a particularly hard day, she would prop her feet on one of the other chairs and sigh, but if Gemma's dad came in, she would right herself briskly, as if she didn't want to be seen slacking.

Gemma pulled the stiffly upright visitor's chair as close to the bed as she could and took her mother's hand a little awkwardly, unsure if the touch would wake her, but her mum's eyelids merely fluttered, then the line on her forehead relaxed, as if she'd found some subconscious comfort.

Dawn found Gemma still there, her cheek now pillowed on the bed beside her mother's hand, when the consultant making early rounds came in with his diagnosis.

"He was circumcised, if that helps." Dr. Rainey peered over his half-glasses at Gavin Hoxley, then back down at the body on his mortuary table. "He could very well have been Jewish."

Hoxley averted his eyes. Circumcised or not, the sight of naked male genitalia, blue tinged and limp, made him feel acutely vulnerable. Nor did he like seeing his unidentified victim stripped of all dignity. The man's hands and nails had been clean, his hair and face barbered and shaved. He had been someone, this thin man with the salt-and-pepper hair, and now he was nothing but a specimen to be poked and prodded on Dr. Rainey's table.

The fact that the man might have been a Jew made Hoxley still more uncomfortable. If it was true, it meant that the autopsy itself would be considered a desecration of the remains.

Not that Hoxley put much stock in autopsies himself, or cared much for pathologists under the best of circumstances. Most of them treated wrongful-death investigations as a nuisance, but Rainey, a small, agile man with a long, mobile face and curly brown hair, had a policeman's curiosity. Hoxley had requested him specifically, even though it had meant trekking across London Bridge to Guy's Hospital.