“No!” The suddenness with which Pierce shot forward and slammed his fist into the desk startled Banks. He saw Susan Gay stand and make towards the door for help, but waved her down.

“Tell me, Owen,” he said. “Tell me how it happened.”

Pierce flopped back in his chair again, as if the energy of his outburst had depleted his reserves. “I want my lawyer,” he said tiredly. “I want Wharton. I’m not saying another word. You people are destroying me. Get me Wharton. And either arrest me or I’m leaving right now.”

Banks turned to Susan and raised his eyebrows, then sighed. “Very well, Owen,” he said. “If that’s the way you want it.”

By late Sunday evening, it was clear that the crowd wasn’t going to storm the Bastille of Eastvale Divisional HQ, and by early Monday morning, there were only a few diehards left.

Banks turned his Walkman up loud as he passed the reporters by the front doors; Maria Callas drowned out all their questions. He said hello to Sergeant Rowe at the front desk, grabbed a coffee and headed upstairs. When he got to the CID offices, he took the earphones out and walked on tiptoe, listening for that snorting-bull sound that usually indicated the presence of Chief Constable Riddle.

Silence-except for Susan Gay’s voice on the telephone, muffled behind her closed door.

Dr. Glendenning’s post-mortem report on Ellen Gilchrist was waiting in Banks’s pigeon hole, along with a preliminary report from the forensic lab, who had put a rush on this one.

In the office, Banks closed his door and pulled up the venetian blinds on yet another fine day. Much more of this and life would start to get boring, he reflected. Still, there was a bit of cloud gathering to the south, and the weather forecast threatened rain, even the possibility of a thunderstorm.

He opened the window a couple of inches and watched the shopkeepers open their doors and roll down their awnings against the sunshine. Then he stretched until he felt something crack pleasantly in his back, and sat down to study the report. He tuned the portable radio he kept in his office to Radio 4 and listened to “Today” as he read.

Glendenning had narrowed the time of death to between eleven and one, confirmed that the victim had been killed in the place where she was found, and matched the strap of her shoulder-bag to the weal in her throat.

The wound behind her ear was round and smooth, he also confirmed, about an inch in diameter, and most likely delivered by a metal hammer-head.

This time, unfortunately, there was no scratched tissue beneath her fingernails. In fact, her fingernails were so badly chewed they had been treated with some vile-tasting chemical to discourage her from biting them.

According to the lab, though there was no blood other than the deceased’s at the scene, there were several hairs on her clothing that didn’t come from her body. That was understandable, given that she had been at a crowded dance. What was damning, though, was that four of the hairs matched those found on Deborah Harrison’s school blazer-the ones that had already also been tested against the sample Owen Pierce had given almost eight months ago.

Hairs could be dodgy evidence, as Pierce’s trial had shown. Banks read through a fair bit of jargon about melanin and fragmented medullas, then considered the neutron activation analysis printout specifying the concentration of various elements in the hair, such as antimony, bromine, lanthanum, strontium and zinc.

The lab would need another sample of the suspect’s hair, the report said, because the ratios of these elements could have changed slightly since the last sample was taken, but even at this point, it was 4500 to one against the hair originating from anyone but Pierce.

Unfortunately, none of the hairs had follicular tissue adhering to their roots; in fact, there were no roots, so it was impossible to identify blood factors or carry out DNA analysis.

As in the Deborah Harrison murder, the swabs showed no signs of semen in the mouth, vagina or anus, and there was no other evidence of sexual activity.

But the hairs and the fingerprints Vic Manson had identified on the plastic film container would probably secure a conviction, Banks guessed. Pierce wasn’t going to slip through the cracks this time.

In a way, Banks felt sad. He had almost convinced himself that Pierce had been an innocent victim of the system and that Deborah’s killer was closer to home; now it looked as if he were wrong again.

He tuned in to Radio 3-where “Composer of the Week” featured Gerald Finzi-and started making notes for the meeting he would soon be having with Stafford Oakes.

Things started to get noisy at around eleven-thirty, with Pierce on his way to court for his remand hearing, the phone ringing off the hook and reporters pressing their faces at every window in the building. Banks decided it was time to sneak out by the side exit and take an early lunch.

He opened the door and popped his head out to scan the corridor. Plenty of activity, but nobody was really paying him much attention. Instead of going the regular way, down to the front door, he tiptoed towards the fire exit, which came out on a narrow street opposite the Golden Grill, called Skinner’s Yard.

He had hardly got to the end of the corridor, when he heard someone call out behind him. His heart lurched.

“Chief Inspector?”

Thank God it wasn’t Jimmy Riddle. He turned. It was DI Barry Stott, and he was looking troubled. “Barry. What is it? What can I do for you?”

“Can I have a word? In private.”

Banks glanced around to see if anyone else was watching them. No. The coast was clear. “Of course,” he said, putting his hand on Stott’s shoulder and guiding him towards the fire door. “Let’s go for a drink, shall we, and get away from the mêlée.”

It was a long time since Rebecca had been to talk to the angel, but that Monday she felt the need again. And this time she wasn’t drunk.

As she turned off the tarmac path onto the gravel, she wondered how she could have been so wrong about Owen Pierce. She remembered how scared she was when she first saw him after his release, then how like a little boy lost he had been when he came to talk to her. When she had asked him the all-important question and he had said he would answer truthfully, she had believed him. Now it looked as if he had lied to her. How could she be sure of anything any more? Of anyone? Even Daniel?

The air around the Inchcliffe Mausoleum was warm and still, the only sounds the drone of insects and the occasional car along Kendal Road or North Market Street. The angel continued to gaze heaven-ward. Rebecca wished she knew what he could see there.

Sober, this time, and feeling a little self-conscious, she couldn’t quite bring herself to speak out loud. But her thoughts flowed and shaped themselves as she stood there feeling silly. She wondered what the policeman, Chief Inspector Banks, would think of her.

The police had claimed that Owen Pierce had killed another girl. That meant they also believed he had killed Deborah Harrison. There could be no way out for him now, Rebecca thought, not with public feeling as strong as it was against him.

But he had visited her at the vicarage only that Saturday afternoon, full of talk about his innocence, the need for support and understanding. She couldn’t get over that, how convinced she had been. Was that the behavior of someone who was intending to go out later that night, pick up a teenage girl and murder her? Rebecca didn’t think so. But what did she know? Experts had done studies on these kinds of people-serial murderers, they called them-though she didn’t know if having killed only two people qualified Owen for that designation.