Annie found the house just off Lothian Road. The two DCs assigned to watch the flat were still sitting in the kitchen, the man with his feet on the table, shirtsleeves rolled up, chewing on a matchstick and reading through a pile of letters, and the woman sipping tea as she flipped through a stack of Hello magazines. Two tipped cigarette butts lay crushed in a Royal Doulton saucer. Somehow, both detectives managed to look like naughty schoolkids caught in the act, though neither showed any trace of guilt. Annie introduced herself.

“And how are things in the frozen north?” asked the man, whose name was Sharpe, keeping his feet firmly on the kitchen table and the matchstick in the corner of his mouth. He looked as if he hadn’t shaved in about four days.

“Hot,” said Annie. “What are you doing?”

Sharpe gestured to the letters. “Just nosing about a bit. Afraid there’s nothing very interesting, just bills, junk mail and bank statements, all pretty much as you’d expect. No really juicy stuff. People don’t write letters the way they used to, do they? It’s all e-mail and texting these days, ’in’it?”

Considering that Sharpe looked about twenty-one, it was odd to hear him being so critical of “these days,” as they were probably the only days he knew. But the irony in his tone wasn’t lost on Annie, and the callous disregard which both of them seemed to display toward the victim’s home angered her. “Okay, thanks for keeping an eye out,” she said. “You can leave now.”

Sharpe looked at his partner, Handy, and raised an eyebrow. The match in the corner of his mouth twitched. “You’re not our guv,” he said.

Annie sighed. “Fine,” she said. “If that’s the way you want to play it. My patience is already running a bit thin.” She took out her mobile, went into the hallway and phoned DI Brooke at Kennington station. After a few pleasantries and the promise of a drink together later that evening, Annie explained the situation briefly, then went back into the kitchen, smiled at Sharpe and handed him the phone.

The moment he put it to his ear, his feet shot off the table and he sat bolt upright in his chair, almost swallowing his matchstick. His partner, who hadn’t said a word so far, frowned at him. When the call was over, Sharpe dropped the mobile on the table, scowled at Annie, then turned to his partner and said, “Come on, Jackie, we’ve got to go.” He made a show of swaggering as slowly as possible out of the house, which Annie thought would have been funny if it hadn’t been so pathetic, and with one mean backward glance mouthed the word “Bitch” and stuck his middle finger in the air.

Annie felt inordinately satisfied when that little scene was over, and she sat down and poured herself a cup of tea. It was lukewarm, but she couldn’t be bothered to make a fresh pot. One of the DCs had opened a window, but it was no use; there was no breeze to bring relief. An empty strand of flypaper twisted in what little air current there was over the sink.

While she was waiting, Annie took out her mobile and rang Gristhorpe in Eastvale. Dr. Glendenning had finished the postmortem on Jennifer Clewes and had found nothing other than the gunshot wound. Her stomach contents consisted of a partially digested ham-and-tomato sandwich, eaten at least two hours before death, which bore out Templeton’s theory that she had driven up from London and probably stopped at a motorway café on the way. Glendenning wouldn’t commit himself to time of death, except to narrow it down to between one and four in the morning. The SOCOs were still working the scene and would get around to examining Banks’s cottage as soon as they could. They had found a partial print on the driver’s door of Jennifer Clewes’s car, but it didn’t match any they had on file.

As it turned out, Annie didn’t have long to wait for Jennifer’s flatmate. At about seven o’clock, the front door opened and she heard a woman’s voice call out. “Jenn? Hello, Jenn? Are you back yet?”

When the owner of the voice walked into the kitchen and saw Annie, she stopped dead in her tracks, put her hand to her chest and backed away. “What is it?” she asked. “Who are you? What are you doing here?”

Annie took out her warrant card and walked over to her. The young woman studied it.

“North Yorkshire?” she said. “I don’t understand. You broke into our house. How did you do that? I didn’t see any damage to the lock.”

“We’ve got keys for all occasions,” said Annie.

“What do you want with me?”

“Are you Kate Nesbit, Jennifer Clewes’s flatmate?”

“Yes,” she answered.

“Maybe you’d better sit down,” said Annie, pulling out a chair at the table.

Kate was still dazed as she lowered herself into the chair. Her eyes lighted on the saucer and her nostrils twitched. “Who’s been smoking? We don’t allow smoking in the flat.”

Annie cursed herself for not getting rid of the butts, though their smell still lingered in the warm air.

“It wasn’t me,” she said, putting the saucer on the draining board. She didn’t know where the waste bin was.

“You mean someone else has been here?”

Annie lingered by the sink. “Just two detectives from your local station. I had words with them. I’m sorry they were so rude. It was necessary to get in, believe me.”

“Necessary?” Kate shook her head. She was a pretty girl, in a very wholesome, no-nonsense sort of way, with her blond hair cut short, black-rimmed oval glasses and a healthy pink glow on her cheeks. She looked athletic, Annie thought, and it was easy to visualize her tall, rangy frame on horseback. Even the clothes she wore, white shorts and a green rugby-style shirt, looked sporty. “What’s going on?” she asked. “It’s not good news, is it?”

“I’m afraid not.” Annie sat down opposite her. “Drink?”

“Not for me. Tell me what it is. It’s not Daddy, is it? It can’t be. I was just there.”

“You were visiting your parents?”

“In Richmond, yes. I go every Saturday when I’m not working.”

“No,” said Annie. “It’s not your father. Look, this might be a bit of a shock, but I need you to look at it.” She opened her briefcase and slipped out the photograph of Jennifer Clewes that Peter Darby had taken at the mortuary. It wasn’t a bad one – she looked peaceful enough and there were no signs of violence, no blood – but there was no doubt that it was a photograph of a dead person. “Is this Jennifer Clewes, your flatmate?”

Kate put her hand to her mouth. “Oh my God,” she said, tears in her eyes. “It’s Jenn. What happened to her? Did she have an accident?”

“In a way. Look, do you have any idea why she was driving up to Yorkshire late last night?”

“I didn’t know that she was.”

“Did you know she’d gone out?”

“Yes. We were home last night. I mean, we don’t live in one another’s pockets, we have our own rooms, but… My God, I don’t believe this.” She put her hands to her face. Annie could see that her whole body was shaking.

“What happened, Kate?” Annie said. “Please, try and focus for me.”

Kate took a deep breath. It seemed to help a little. “There was nothing we wanted to watch on telly, so we were just watching a DVD. Bend It Like Beckham. Jenn’s mobile went off and she swore. We were enjoying the film. Anyway, she went into her bedroom to answer it and when she came back she said there was an emergency and she had to go out, to just carry on watching the film without her. She said she wasn’t sure when she would be back. Now you’re telling me she’ll never come back.”

“What time was this?”

“I don’t know. I suppose it’d be about half past ten, a quarter to eleven.”

That was consistent with the timing, Annie thought. It would take about four hours to drive from Kennington to Eastvale, depending on traffic, and Jennifer Clewes had been killed between one and four o’clock in the morning about three miles shy of her destination. “Did she give you any idea about where she might be going?”