“We’d got a notice about break-ins in the neighbourhood,” she said and turned to her husband. “When was that, Ron?”

He paused in his feeding of the toddler, spoon poised in the air. “Early autumn?” he said.

“I think that’s right.” She went back to Nkata. “So when the van crept along, it looked suspicious. I took down its number plates.”

“Well done,” Nkata told her.

She said, “Then we got home and the alarm was going off. Ron ran upstairs and saw the boy just as he went out of the window and onto the roof. Of course, we phoned the police at once, but he was long gone by the time they got here.”

“Took them two hours,” her husband said grimly. “Makes you wonder.”

Gail looked apologetic. “Well, naturally, there must have been other things…more important…an accident or serious crime…not that it wasn’t serious to us, to come home and find someone inside our house. But to the police…”

“Don’t make excuses for them,” her husband told her. He set down the porridge bowl and the spoon and used the edge of a tea towel to wipe the residue from his young child’s face. “Law enforcement’s going down the toilet. Has been for years.”

“Ron!”

“No offence intended,” he said to Nkata. “It’s probably not down to you.”

Nkata said no offence was taken, and he asked them if they’d given the number plates of that van to their local police.

They had done, they said. The very night they phoned. When the police finally showed up on their doorstep-“Must have been two A.M. then,” Ritucci said-it was in the person of two female constables. They took a report and tried to look sympathetic. They said they would be in touch and in the meantime to come down to the station in a few days and pick up their report for insurance purposes.

“That was the end of it,” Gail Ritucci told Nkata.

“Cops didn’t do a bloody thing,” her husband added.

ON HER WAY to meet Lynley in Upper Holloway, Barbara Havers stopped by the ground-floor flat, which she’d been passing assiduously with her eyes directed forward for ages by this point. She carried with her the peace offering she’d bought off Barry Minshall’s stall: the pencil-through-the-five-pound-note trick meant to amuse and delight one’s friends.

She missed both Taymullah Azhar and Hadiyyah. She missed the casual friendship they shared, dropping by one another’s digs for a chat whenever the fancy took them. They weren’t family. She couldn’t even say they were the next best thing to family. But they were…something, a piece of familiarity and a comfort. She wanted both back, and she was willing to eat humble pie if that was what it was going to take to put things right between them.

She knocked on their door and said, “Azhar? It’s me. Have you got a few minutes?” Then she stood back. A dim light shone through the curtains, so she knew they were up and about, perhaps shrugging into dressing gowns or something.

No one answered. Music’s on, she told herself. A radio alarm that hadn’t been shut off after it awoke the sleeper. She’d been too quiet in her attempt. So she knocked again, harder this time. She listened and tried to decide if what she heard behind the door was the rustle of someone disturbing the curtains to see who’d come calling so early in the morning. She looked towards the window; she studied the panel of material that covered the panes of the French door. Nothing.

Then she felt embarrassed. She stood back another step. She said more quietly, “Well, all right then,” and she moved off to her car. If that was the way he wanted it…If she’d hit him so far below the belt with her remark about his wife taking off…But she’d said nothing but the truth, hadn’t she? And anyway, they’d both played dirty and he hadn’t been trotting to the bottom of the garden to apologise to her.

She forced herself to shrug the matter off and she used even more determination to leave the vicinity without looking back to see if one of them was watching her from a parted curtain. She went to where she’d left her car, all the way over in Parkhill Road, which was the closest space she’d been able to find upon her return the previous night.

From there she drove to Upper Holloway and found the comprehensive whose address Lynley had phoned to her while she’d still been in bed, trying to make herself rise to the irresistible oldies beat of Diana Ross and the Supremes ordering someone to “set me free why doanchew babe” on her radio alarm. She’d reached for the phone, attempted to sound chipper, and taken down the information on the inside bodice-ripping cover of Torn by Desire, which had kept her awake far into the night with the burning question of whether the hero and heroine would give in to their fatal passion for each other. That would take some heavy guesswork, she’d told herself sardonically.

The comprehensive in question wasn’t too far from Bovingdon Close, where Davey Benton’s family lived. It looked like a minimum-security prison, one whose occasional visual relief had been supplied courtesy of a David Hockney wanna-be.

Despite the distance he’d had to travel to get there in comparison with her own, Lynley was already waiting for her. He looked dead grim. He’d been to call upon the Bentons, he explained.

“How’re they doing?”

“As you’d expect. As anyone would be doing in the same situation.” Lynley’s words were terse, even more than she would have expected them to be. She looked at him curiously and was about to ask him what was up when he nodded at the front of the school. “Ready, then?” he asked her.

Barbara was. They were there to talk to one Andy Crickleworth, supposed mate of Davey Benton. Lynley had said on the phone that he wanted as much ammunition as possible when they finally spoke to Barry Minshall in an interview room at the Holmes Street police station, and he had a feeling that Andy Crickleworth would be the person to supply it.

He’d phoned ahead so the comprehensive’s administrators would be aware of the police interest in one of their pupils. Thus it was a matter of a few minutes only before Lynley and Barbara found themselves in the company of the school’s headteacher, his secretary, and a thirteen-year-old boy. The secretary looked grey and defeated, and the headteacher had the used-up appearance of a man for whom a pension couldn’t come too soon. For his part, the boy had braces on his teeth, spots on his face, and hair slicked back in the manner of a 1930s gigolo. By raising one half of his upper lip as he entered the room, he managed to look scornful about the whole matter of meeting the police. But the rehearsed snarl couldn’t stop the fidgeting of his hands, which pressed down into his groin throughout the interview, as if they wished to stop him from wetting himself.

The headteacher-Mr. Fairbairn-made the introductions. They held their meeting in a conference room, round an institutional table that was itself surrounded by uncomfortable institutional chairs. His secretary sat in a corner, taking notes furiously, as if they’d need to be compared to Barbara’s in an eventual lawsuit.

Lynley began by asking Andy Crickleworth if he knew that Davey Benton was dead. Davey’s name was due to be released to the press that morning, but the grapevine is a powerful plant. If the school had been informed of the murder via Davey’s parents, there was a high probability the word was out.

Andy said, “Yeah. Everyone knows. Least everyone in year eight knows.” He didn’t sound regretful about the matter. He clarified this by saying, “He got murdered, right?,” and the tone of the question suggested being murdered was a higher form of leaving life than falling ill or dying in an accident, achieving a coolness unavailable to the others.

That belief would be typical of almost any thirteen-year-old boy, Barbara thought. Sudden death was a seven-day wonder to them, happening to someone else and never to you. She said lightly, “Throttled first, discarded second, Andy,” to see if that would shake him. “You know there’s a serial killer working round London, don’t you?”