Not that he actually needed one. This journey was owed, not to him but by him. The time had definitely come.

He got out of the car and walked the short distance to the wig shop, still a hopeful sign of what was possible among the failed and boarded-up establishments in the neighbourhood. The pubs, naturally, were still doing business. But other than a dismal corner shop with heavy grilles on the windows, Yasmin Edwards’ business was the only place open.

When Nkata entered, he saw that Yasmin was with a client. This was a skeletal black woman with a death’s-head face. She was bald, and she sat slumped in a beauty chair before the long, mirrored wall and the counter at which Yasmin worked. On the counter, a makeup case was open. Three wigs stood near it: one comprising a head full of plaits; one close cropped like Yasmin’s hair; one long and straight, of the sort worn by catwalk models.

Yasmin’s glance went to Nkata and then away, as if she’d been expecting him and was unsurprised by his arrival. He nodded at her, but he knew she didn’t see. She was focussed on her client and the brush on which she was applying blusher from a round tin box.

“I jus’ can’t see it,” her client said. Her voice was as exhausted as her body looked. “Don’t you bother with that, Yas-meen.”

“You wait,” Yasmin told her gently. “Le’ me fix you, luv, and in the meantime, study those wigs for the one you want.”

“I’n’t going to make a difference, is it,” the woman said. “I don’ know why I even came.”

“’Cause you’re pretty, Ruby, an’ the world deserves to see that.”

Ruby pooh-poohed her. “No more I’m pretty now,” she said.

Yasmin didn’t answer this remark, positioning herself instead in front of the woman in order to study her face. Yasmin’s own was professional, devoid of the pity that the other woman would doubtless have been able to sense in an instant. Yasmin bent towards her and applied the brush along the ridge of her cheekbones. She followed this with a similar movement along her jaw.

Nkata waited patiently. He watched Yasmin work: the flick of a brush, a heightening of shading round the eyes. She finished her client off with lipstick, which she applied with a delicate paintbrush. She wore no kind of lipstick herself. The rose-bloom scar on her upper lip-long-ago gift of her husband-made this impossible.

She stood back and surveyed her work. She said, “Now you’re something, Ruby. Which wig’s goin’ to finish off the picture?”

“Oh, Yas-meen, I dunno.”

“Now come on. Your husband i’n’t waiting out there for some bald-headed lady with a pretty new face. You want to try them again?”

“The short one, I guess.”

“You sure? The long one made you look like what-sername the model.”

Ruby chuckled. “Oh yeah, ’m ready for Fashion Week, Yas-meen. Maybe they’ll put me in a bikini. I finally got the figger for it. Le’ me do the short one. I like it good enough.”

Yasmin removed the short wig from the stand. She lowered it gently onto Ruby’s head. She stood back, then made an adjustment, then stood back again. “You’re ready for a big night out,” she said. “Make sure your man sees you get it.” She helped Ruby out of the beauty chair and took the voucher that the woman held out to her. She gently pushed away an additional ten-pound note that Ruby tried to press upon her. “None ’f that,” she said. “Buy some flowers for your flat.”

“Flowers enough at the funeral,” Ruby said.

“Yeah, but the corpse don’t get to enjoy them.”

They chuckled together. Yasmin saw her to the door. A car at the kerb waited for her, one door swinging open. Yasmin eased her inside.

When she returned to the shop, she went at once to the beauty chair where she began to repack her makeup supplies. Nkata said to her, “What’s she got?”

“Pancreas,” Yasmin said shortly.

“Bad?”

“Pancreas’s always bad, Sergeant. She’s doing chemo, but i’n’t any point. What d’you want, man? I got work to do.”

He approached her but still kept a safe distance between them. “I got a brother,” he said. “He’s Harold, but we called him Stoney. Cos he was stubborn as a stone in a field. A Stonehenge kind of stone, I mean. One you can’t budge no matter what.”

Yasmin paused in putting the makeup away, a brush in her hand. She frowned at Nkata. “So?”

Nkata licked his lower lip. “He’s in Wandsworth. Life.”

Her glance moved away, then back to him. She knew what that meant. Murder. “He do it?”

“Oh yeah. Stoney…Yeah. That was Stoney all the way through. Got a gun somewhere-he’d never say from who-and whacked a bloke in Battersea. He and his mate were trying to carjack his BMW and the bloke didn’t cooperate like they wanted. Stoney shot him in the back of the head. An execution. His mate turned him in.”

She stood there for a moment, as if evaluating this. Then she went back to work.

“Thing is,” Nkata went on, “I could’ve gone the same way and was doing jus’ that, ’cept I figured I was cleverer than Stoney. I could fight better, an’ anyway I wasn’t in’erested in ripping off cars. I had a gang, see, and they were my brothers, more brothers to me’n Stoney could’ve ever been anyway. So I fought with them cos that’s what we did. We fought over turf. This pavement, that pavement, this newsagent’s, that tobacconist. I end up in Casualty with my face split open”-he gestured to his cheek and the scar that ran down it-“and my mum faints dead on the floor when she sees it. I look at her and I look at my dad and I know he means to beat me bloody when we get home, with or without my face done up in stitches. And I see-all of a sudden, this was-that he means to beat me not for myself but cos I hurt Mum like Stoney hurt Mum. And then I really see how they treat her: doctors and nurses in Casualty, this is. They treat her like she did somethin’ wrong, which is what they think she did cos one of her boys ’s in prison and the other’s a Brixton Warrior. And that’s it.” Nkata held out his hands, empty. “A cop makes conversation with me-this is about the fight that got me the scar-and he starts me off in another direction. And I cling to him and I cling to it cos I won’t do to Mum what Stoney did.”

“As easy as that?” Yasmin asked. He could hear the note of scorn in her voice.

“As simple as that,” Nkata corrected her politely. “I wouldn’t ever say it was easy.”

Yasmin finished packing her makeup away. She closed the case with a snap and heaved it from the counter. She carried it to the back of the shop and shoved it on a shelf before she placed one hand on a hip and said, “That all?”

“No.”

“Fine. What else?”

“I live with my mum and dad. Over on Loughborough Estate. I’m goin’ to stay living with them no matter what cos they’re getting older and the older they get, the more dangerous it is over there. For them. I won’t have them facing aggro from smackheads an’ dope dealers an’ pimps. That lot don’t like me, they don’t wan’ to be round me, they sure as hell don’ trust me, and they keep their distance from my mum and my dad, long as I’m there. Tha’s how I want it and I’ll do what it takes to keep it that way.”

Yasmin cocked her head. Her face maintained its distrustful, scornful expression, the same expression she’d worn since he’d met her. “So. Why’re you telling me this?”

“Cos I want you to know the truth. An’ thing is, Yas, the truth i’n’t a road without curves and diversions. So you got to know that, yeah, I was ’tracted to you the first moment I saw you and who wouldn’t be? So, yeah, I wanted you away from Katja Wolfe but not cos I believed you’re meant for a man’s love and not a woman’s love cos I di’n’t know that, did I, how could I. But cos I wanted a chance with you and the only way to get that chance was to prove to you Katja Wolfe wasn’t worthy of what you had to offer. But at the same time, Yas, I liked Daniel from the first ’s well. An’ I could see Daniel liked me back. An’ I bloody well know-knew it then and know it now-how life can be for kids on the street with time on their hands, specially kids like Daniel, without dads in the house. An’ it wasn’t cos I thought you weren’t-aren’t-a good mum, cos I could see that you were. But I thought Dan needed more-he still needs more-an that’s what I came to tell you.”