MACDONALD TOOK CROYDON ROAD NORTHWEST THROUGH Mitcham, Morden and Merton, then headed west on Kingston Road through Streatham to Wandsworth and Clapham. Mile upon mile of red and gray brick row houses were interrupted by parks, schoolyards and stores clumped earnestly together. Thruways had become cross streets. Double-decker buses peered out over the other vehicles and lurched around corners. Cars as far as the eye could see, drivers sitting on their horns. More stores with flower and vegetable stands out front. It went on and on.

“ London is more than just Soho or Covent Garden, and all this is my territory.” Macdonald gestured to the world outside.

All that’s living, dead and everything in between, Winter thought. “It’s a big place,” he said.

“It’s more complicated than that. Did I mention that Croydon is the tenth largest town in England?”

“Yes, the first time you called.”

“I should be keeping my hands off Clapham. I’m invading the turf of my colleagues on the southwest side. But it’s my old district and the bigwigs thought I was best suited for this investigation.”

“What did your colleagues on the southwest side have to say about that?”

“The murder of a white foreigner? They pounded me on the back and then laughed behind it.”

“So you’re a popular guy.”

“More than ever.” Macdonald swerved to avoid a fruit cart that had just rolled out of an alleyway to the left. He glared at the black man who emerged behind it, clinging to the handle as if he were being pulled along.

“Did I tell you that this so-called thoroughfare is named Kingston Road?”

“Yes.”

“It’s no coincidence.”

They drove through Tulse Hill. Winter heard a whistle and saw a train pass on a viaduct above them, then clatter to a halt in front of the station building.

“Karen and Winston Hillier live in this neighborhood,” Macdonald said.

Winter nodded. “I want to meet them.”

“I’ll do what I can, but Winston just got back from the hospital after a nervous breakdown. It happened when I was at their house.”

Macdonald drove west on Christchurch Road and crossed the intersection. “The street on the right is Brixton Hill,” he said. “Follow it and there you are in the Caribbean.”

“Ah, Brixton.”

“Have you ever been there?”

“No, but I’ve heard about it.”

“ ‘ The Guns of Brixton.’ The Clash.”

“What?”

“The Clash.”

“Is that a band or something?”

Glancing over at Winter, Macdonald laughed and hit the brake to let a taxi pull away from the curb.

“The Only Band That Matters.”

“Not my kind of music.”

“I knew right off there was something wrong with you.”

Macdonald’s police radio chattered constantly with names of districts Winter had never heard of. He could hardly make out the words. The woman at the emergency hotline coordinated the calls as if she were reciting from a script.

“Brixton is a fascinating place,” Macdonald said. “Lots of my friends live there.”

The traffic was backed up on Poynders Road.

“I was thinking about the passenger lists on my way to London.”

“Hmm.”

“It’s a hell of a job.”

“That Jamaica case I told you about before? We went through three weeks of passenger lists, and that was bad enough.”

“We asked for them anyway.”

“Same here, but if-I’m saying if-you go to another country to kill someone, you’re hardly going to fly under your own name.”

“Unless the murderer is actually looking to get caught.”

“So all we have to do is eliminate the names on the lists one by one until we reach the murderer’s, and he’ll be sitting there waiting for us to knock on his door?”

“Something like that.”

“It’s an idea. Have you talked to a forensic psychologist about it?”

“Not yet. It’s just one possibility.”

“Let me tell you a story.”

The traffic began to move again, forming a semicircle around a car that had been pulled over to the shoulder and was being hoisted onto a tow truck.

“It was a Ford Fiesta too, did you see that car?” Macdonald nodded at the side of the road.

“Of course.”

“There was a murder in Peckham last Christmas, and all we had to go on were a few witnesses who saw a man drive away from the scene of the crime around the time it was committed.”

“Okay.”

“Some witnesses said that the car was silver, another that it was brightly colored. One guy swore that it was a Mark 1 Fiesta. He didn’t see it but he heard it drive away in the night and said, ‘I’ve owned Ford Fiestas all my life, and I know one when I hear it.’ ”

“Was he trustworthy?”

“As far as we could tell. So we decided to check all Mark 1 Fiestas. First we concentrated on southeast England. We identified ten thousand cars. No way. We didn’t have anywhere near the staff to track all of them down.”

“So you decided to go by color?”

“Good thinking. We settled on silver and narrowed it down to eighteen hundred cars. Still an impossible task, considering we only had ten people and they were following up other leads at the same time.”

“Hmm.”

“So we zeroed in on Peckham- East Lewisham, to be exact. That left us with about a hundred and fifty cars. We didn’t get very far, because some other information came to our attention that solved the case. As it turned out, the car was green. But, sure enough, it was a Fiesta.”

“In other words, you can trust what people hear more than what they see.”

“Yes, but my main point is that burying yourself in a bunch of lists isn’t necessarily the way to go. Still, we keep them on hand in case we need them.”

Winter nodded.

“Once we have a suspect, we can check the lists and say, Aha, he flew the day after his victim.”

Winter heard voices from the hallway but not a sound from the adjacent rooms. A car zoomed from Cautley Avenue onto Clapham Common South Side. The afternoon sun sliced through the window and lit up the opposite wall, adding a luster to the dry blood that made Winter close his eyes and see Per in front of him. He had walked through that door over there, and the remnants of his life were now splattered on the walls and floor. Winter was sweating. He loosened his tie. He had a sour taste in his mouth from the cigarillo and the top-fermented ale.

“Do you want to be alone?” Macdonald asked.

“Yes, if you don’t mind.”

Macdonald turned to leave.

“Close the door, please,” Winter said.

He shut his eyes again and saw the photographs. Macdonald had shown them to him at his office just a few minutes earlier. The similarities to what he had encountered in Gothenburg were frightening. Per was sitting in the same position, slumped against the chair with an eerie nonchalance, his back to the door as if he were reading a book. Opening his eyes, Winter walked over and stood behind the chair. Macdonald had left it exactly where it was when Per had sat in it.

Had Per been placed here for a reason? Had he been tied to the chair so that he could watch something enacted on the wall? Was he still alive at that point?

All of the victims had rope marks on their bodies, but it was as if the rope was there to keep them from falling off the chair, not to prevent them from escaping. No bruises or wounds to indicate a struggle, no signs that the thin strands had frayed.

Had Per been forced to watch another murder? A movie? Geoff had been killed at around the same time in Gothenburg. Could the murderer really have made his way from one city to the other that quickly? Maybe. Assuming it was the same person. Were there more murders that they didn’t know about? Was Per watching a video of one of them just before he died? Did it matter which way he was facing?

Winter looked at the floor. There were traces of blood that would have thickened even while the murder was taking place, sticking to shoes, footprints swirled across the linoleum as in a dance.