‘Tricky, you said?’

‘I was talking to Jesmond,’ Brigstocke said.

Thorne winced theatrically at the mention of the superintendent’s name. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Somebody has to. Anyway, there appears to be a strong feeling that using the press in the way you’re suggesting might not be a good idea.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because it may alert the killer to the fact that we’re on to him.’

‘Is that a problem?’

‘They think it might be, if we want to catch him.’

‘So, we want to catch him more than we want to protect the people he’s trying to kill?’

Brigstocke sighed. ‘Listen, I know.’

‘That’s mental,’ Thorne said. ‘He must already know we’re on to him. He left the bits of X-ray, for Christ’s sake. He wants us to put it all together.’

‘I’m just letting you know what I was told, all right?’

‘On top of which, I can’t see this bloke just packing his bags and buggering off because he sees a few photos in the paper.’

‘Point taken.’

‘I don’t think he’s the type to stop.’

‘Look, there’s no point getting arsy with me. I’m just telling you, there’s a… tension, between the different… priorities.’

‘Surely the first priority has to be protecting the potential victims?’ Kitson said.

‘Tell that to Debbie Mitchell.’ Brigstocke turned to Thorne. ‘In fact, you can tell the superintendent, seeing as you feel so strongly about it. They’re talking about putting a critical incident panel together.’

‘I’d rather stick needles in my eyes,’ Thorne said. He had sat on such a panel a couple of times before, struggling to look interested while diplomats in uniform droned on about media strategy, and had sworn that he would never do so again.

‘Right, in which case you should get off your high horse and stop giving me grief.’ Brigstocke took one last mouthful of pasta and pushed back his chair. ‘Fair enough?’

Neither Thorne nor Kitson ate too much more after Brigstocke had left and let the waitress take away the plates the next time she was passing.

‘High horse?’

‘High-ish,’ Kitson said.

‘Come on, I’m right though, aren’t I?’

‘I don’t think he disagrees with you, but there’s not a great deal he can do about it. Rock and a hard place, all that.’

There was still fifteen minutes before either of them was due back at Becke House. Thorne drained his glass. ‘So, do you really fancy spending the rest of the afternoon ringing up people you know haven’t killed anyone and asking them if they’ve killed anyone?’

‘You finally had a bright idea?’

‘What you said about arresting Debbie Mitchell.’

‘I was only half joking.’

‘Let’s take a drive over there. You never know, if we push it, we might get her to assault one of us.’

Kitson took a compact from her handbag and reapplied her lipstick. ‘I’ll toss you for it in the car,’ she said.

Totteridge was a leafy north London suburb with a bona fide village at its heart, where men who owned or played for football clubs lived with their suspiciously expressionless wives. A few minutes away towards Barnet, however, you would find yourself in a noticeably less well-heeled area just shy of the Great North Road, where most of the footballers were the sort who kicked lumps out of one another on Sunday mornings, smoking in the centre circle at half time and heading straight for a fry-up at the final whistle.

Debbie Mitchell lived on the top floor of a three-storey block on the Dollis Park Estate, a sprawl of sixties and seventies mixed-tenure housing in the shadow of Barnet FC’s ground. From the window of the small, smoke-filled living room, Thorne could just make out the floodlights of Underhill, the corner of the stadium’s main stand.

‘It must get pretty busy on match days,’ Kitson said.

‘Hang on a minute, this is Barnet we’re talking about,’ Thorne said. ‘They’d probably think the four of us was a pretty decent crowd.’

Only Kitson smiled as Thorne turned back to the window. Looking the other way, he could see the main road, the green belt rolling away beyond a petrol station and an enormous branch of Carpet Express.

‘Vision Express I can just about understand,’ he said, pointing. ‘Even Shoe Express, at a push. You know, you lose a shoe, you’re late for a party, whatever. But who could possibly need a carpet… really fast?’

‘What’s he on about?’

‘I mean, in how much of a hurry does someone have to be?’

One of the two women sitting close together on the sofa nodded towards Thorne, then turned to address Kitson who was perched on the edge of a dining chair near the door. ‘I get it,’ she said. ‘They’ve not got anywhere with the sensitive ones, or the ones who marched in here shouting the odds, so now they’ve sent the copper who thinks he’s a bloody comedian.’

Nina Collins was a good few years older than Debbie Mitchell, early forties, probably, and she had done most of the talking since Thorne and Kitson had arrived. She had opened the door, told them she was a friend of Debbie, her best friend, and that Debbie was inside, trying to get some rest and keep Jason calm. That she was frazzled, and who the hell wouldn’t be, with coppers ringing up every ten minutes telling her she had to get out of her home?

‘I suppose you’ve come to have another bash,’ she’d said, blowing cigarette smoke at them, before turning and walking back inside.

In the living room, Thorne turned from the window again and shrugged. ‘As a matter of fact,’ he said, ‘quite a few people tell me I’m pretty funny.’

Collins stubbed out her cigarette. ‘They’re wrong,’ she said.

Thorne dragged a footstool across and sat down on it in front of the television. He looked at the two women. Collins was short and large-breasted, with black hair tousled into spikes, red at the tips when it caught the light. She wore a tight, striped rugby shirt that showed off her chest and there was a softness in her face, at odds with the body language and the brittle, Benson & Hedges voice. (Later, when there were new cases to worry about, Thorne would confess to Kitson, after a couple of pints, that he’d secretly quite fancied Nina Collins.)

‘He’s got a point,’ the woman next to Collins said. ‘It is a bloody stupid name. The carpets are seriously cheap, though, I’ll give them that.’

Debbie Mitchell was taller and skinnier than her friend. Her hair was long and dirty-blond, cut very straight on either side of a face that was drawn and blotchy, the foundation failing to hide an angry cluster of whiteheads around one nostril. She was barefoot, with her legs pulled up beneath her and one arm trailing over the edge of the sofa, in almost permanent contact with the boy playing on the carpet at her side.

‘He seems happy,’ Kitson said.

Collins turned as though she’d forgotten Kitson was there. ‘He is happy. He’s always happiest when he’s with his mum.’

‘Does he have any kind of… carer?’

‘Just me,’ Mitchell said. ‘There’s just us.’

Jason was tall for his age – eight, according to his mother’s file – and the pyjamas he was wearing looked a year or two too small for him. He pushed a large plastic train – the sort a slightly younger child might ride around on – up and down in a straight line along the side of the sofa. It was obviously a game he played a lot. There were track marks worn into the brown carpet.

‘What about school?’ Thorne asked.

‘He goes to a special place three days a week,’ Mitchell said. ‘Up in Hatfield. I have to stay with him, though, because he screams the place down if I’m not there.’

Collins held up two fingers. ‘Twice social services have taken Jason away from her and every time it’s been a nightmare for him.’ Mitchell shook her head, eyes down, as though she didn’t want her friend to continue, but Collins raised her hand again, determined to have her say. ‘Supposed to be for his own good, being separated from his mum, and of course he bloody hates it.’ She reached across and squeezed Mitchell’s hand. ‘Every time she’s cleaned herself up and sorted her life out, though, haven’t you, darling?’