She’d begun to tremble. Nkata wanted to reach across the counter that separated them and offer her comfort and the assurance that not all men…But he knew she would not believe him and he wasn’t sure if he believed himself. And as he tried to think what to say to her, the door opened, the buzzer went off, and another black man came into the shop. His gaze lit upon Yasmin, made a quick assessment, and flicked to Nkata.

“Yasmin,” he said, and he pronounced it differently. Yasmeen, he said in a soft foreign voice. “Is there trouble here, Yasmin? Are you here alone?”

It was the way he talked to her. It was the tone and the look that went with it. Nkata felt every which way a fool.

He said to the other man, “She is now,” and he left the two of them together.

BARBARA HAVERS decided a fag was in order. She considered it a little reward, the carrot she’d held out in front of herself during her long slog on the computer, followed by her further slogs on the phone. She’d managed this spate of unwelcome work with what she liked to think of as extreme good grace, when all the time what she really wanted to do was have a real slog over to Elephant and Castle so that she might engage the decidedly more pleasant slog of shaking things up at Colossus. During all this time, she’d done her best to ignore her feelings: her outrage at DI Stewart’s remarks, her impatience with the grunt work she was being assigned, her schoolgirl envy-bloody hell, was that what it really was?-seeing Winston Nkata chosen by Lynley to accompany him to duel with the assistant commissioner. So, as far as she was concerned, at this late hour of the day she was owed the metaphorical rosette-on-her-lapel, which she decided a fag would represent.

On the other hand, she had to admit, however much she disliked doing so, that the computer and telephone slog had actually produced more ammunition for her to use when she made her next appearance across the river. So she gave grudging acknowledgement to the wisdom of completing activities assigned to her, and she even considered writing up her report in a timely manner as a way of admitting her earlier error in judgement. But she discarded that notion in favour of a fag. She told herself that, if she had her smoke surreptitiously in the stairwell, she’d be that much closer to the incident room and thus that much closer to a location in which she could fill out the appropriate paperwork…once she had the shot-in-the-eyeball of nicotine for which her body was crying out.

So she decamped to the stairwell, plopped down, lit up, and inhaled. Bliss. Not the plate of lasagne and chips she would have preferred at this hour. But a decent second.

“Havers, exactly what are you doing?”

Bloody hell. Barbara scrambled to her feet. Lynley had just come through the doorway, preparatory to climbing or descending the stairs. He had his overcoat slung over one shoulder, so she assumed descending was the order of the day. It was something of a journey down to the carpark, but the stairwell always gave one time to think, which was probably what he’d planned unless his intention had been to escape without detection, which was also an option that the stairwell afforded.

She said, “Composing my thoughts. I did the Griffin Strong stuff, and I was sorting through how best to present the information.” She offered him the notes she’d taken from both the computer and the telephone calls. She’d begun scribbling them in her spiral book but unfortunately had run out of paper. She’d been reduced to using whatever lay at hand, which had turned out to be two used envelopes from the wastepaper basket and a paper napkin she’d rummaged out of her bag.

Lynley looked from all this to her.

She said, “Hey. Before you give me aggro-”

“I’m beyond it,” he said. “What have you got?”

Barbara happily settled in for a natter, fag dangling from her lips as she spoke. “First of all, according to his wife, Griffin Strong’s doing the mattress polka with Ulrike Ellis. Arabella-that’s the wife-puts him with Ulrike for every killing no matter when it was. Without a second to think it over, mind you. I don’t know about you, but that tells me she’s dead desperate to keep him bringing home the dosh while she cares for the baby and does jumping jacks in front of the telly all day. Fine. That’s understandable, I suppose. But it turns out our Griff has a history of taking up with the ladies at all his places of employment, getting in too deep-if you’ll pardon the pun-then losing his way and letting the ball drop with reference to his responsibilities.”

Lynley leaned against the stair rail, listening tolerantly to her metaphor mixing. He had his eyes fixed on hers, so she entertained the idea that she might actually be on the way to resurrecting something of her reputation, not to mention something of her career. She waxed enthusiastic on her topic.

“Turns out he was sacked from Social Services in Lewisham for falsifying his reports.”

“That’s an interesting twist.”

“He was supposedly checking up on kids in care but in reality only managing to get to one in ten.”

“Why?”

“The obvious. He was too busy bonking his cubicle mate. He got warned off once and written up twice before the axe finally fell, and it seems the only reason he got taken on over in Stockwell was that none of the kids on his roster at Lewisham actually suffered from his neglect.”

“In this day and age, though…There were no repercussions?”

“Not a whisper. I talked to his Lewisham supervisor, who’d got convinced by someone-and for that I wager you can read Griffin Strong-that Griff was far more pursued than pursuer. Beating this bird off with a nail-studded stick for months on end, to hear the way Strong’s guv told the tale. ‘Anyone would have succumbed to her eventually,’ was how he put it.”

“His supervisor being male, I take it?”

“Naturally. And you should’ve heard him talk about this bird. Like she was the sexual equivalent of the bubonic plague.”

“What about at Stockwell?” Lynley said.

“The kid that died under Strong’s care was attacked.”

“By whom?”

“A gang with an initiation rite involving chasing down twelve-year-olds and cutting them up with broken bottles. They caught him crossing Angell Park, and what was s’posed to be a cut on the thigh hit an artery and he bled to death before he could get home.”

“Christ,” Lynley said. “But that was hardly Strong’s fault, was it?”

“When you consider the kid who cut him up was his own foster brother…?”

Lynley raised his head heavenward. He looked done in. “How old was the foster brother, then?”

Barbara glanced at her notes. “Eleven,” she said.

“What happened to him?”

She continued to read. “Psychiatric lockup till he’s eighteen. For all the good it’ll do.” She knocked the growing tube of ash from her fag. “It all made me think…”

“About?”

“The killer. Seems to me that he sees himself ridding the flock of black sheep. Like it’s sort of a religion to him. When you think of all the aspects of ritual that’re part of the killings…” She let him finish the thought for himself.

Lynley rubbed his forehead and leaned against the handrail of the stairs. He said, “Barbara, I don’t care what he’s thinking. These are children we’re talking about, not genetic mutations. Children need guidance when they go wrong, and they need protection the rest of the time. Full stop. End of story.”

“Sir, we’re on the same page,” Barbara said. “Start to finish.” She dropped the nub of her cigarette on the stairs and crushed it out. To cover the trace of her malefaction, she picked up the dog end and placed it, along with her notes, in her shoulder bag. She said, “Trouble upstairs?,” with reference to Lynley’s meeting with Hillier.

“No more than usual,” Lynley said. “Winston isn’t turning out to be the blue-eyed boy the AC thought he’d be, though.”