“Already?” she asked. “Holy hell. That was fast.” She looked round. She noted the grim expressions. She said, “He wanted to keep that bloke Corsico occupied. Didn’t that work, or something?”

“He was occupied, all right,” Nkata said. “Tracked down his house and ran a picture of it. He doesn’t say what street, but he says Belgravia.”

Barbara’s eyes widened. “The sod. That’s bad.”

She worked her way forward as other of her colleagues moved off, having had their look at the paper. She flipped it to the front page to see the headline: “His Lordship the Cop” and an accompanying photo of Lynley and Helen, arms round each others’ waists and champagne glasses in their hands. Havers recognised the picture. It had been taken at an anniversary party the previous November. Webberly and his wife, celebrating their twenty-fifth, just days before a killer had attempted to make him another of his victims.

She skimmed the accompanying article as Nkata joined her. She saw that Dorothea Harriman had done her part, as Lynley had described it to her, encouraging Corsico to pursue information left, right, and centre. But what they had all failed to anticipate was the speed with which the reporter would be able to put together his facts, mould them into the usual breathless prose of the typical tabloid story, and combine them with information that was more than the public had a right to know.

Like the approximate location of the Lynleys’ house, Barbara thought. There was going to be hell to pay for that.

She found the photograph of the Eaton Terrace house when she made the jump to page four for the continuation of the story. She found there, in addition to that picture, another photo, of the Lynley family pile in Cornwall, along with one of the superintendent as an adolescent in his Eton togs as well as one with him posing with his fellow oarsmen at Oxford.

“Flipping, flaming hell,” she muttered. “How in God’s name did he get this stuff?”

Nkata’s response was, “Makes you wonder what he’s going to unearth when he gets to the rest of us.”

She looked up at him. If he could have looked green, he would have looked green. Winston Nkata would not want his background offered up for public consumption. She said, “The guv will keep him away from you, Winnie.”

“Not the guv I’m worried about, Barb.”

Hillier. That would be Winnie’s concern. Because if Lynley made excellent fodder for the papers, what would the tabloids do when they got their teeth into the “Former Gang Member Makes Good” variety of tale? What Nkata’s life was worth in Brixton was a moot issue at the best of times. What it would be worth should the story of his “redemption” hit the papers was a frightening one.

A sudden silence hit the room, and Barbara looked up to see that Lynley had joined them. He looked grim, and she wondered if he was castigating himself for having made himself the sacrificial lamb that The Source had offered on the altar of its circulation figures.

What he said was, “At least they haven’t got on to Yorkshire yet,” and a nervous murmur greeted this remark. It was the single but indelible blight on his career and his reputation: his brother-in-law’s murder and the part he’d played in the ensuing inquiry.

“They will, Tommy,” John Stewart said.

“Not if we give them a bigger story.” Lynley went to the china board. He looked at the photographs assembled on it and the list of activities assigned to the team members. He said, as he usually did, “What do we have?”

The first report came from the officers who had been gathering information from the commuters who parked on Wood Lane and then walked the path down the hill, through Queen’s Wood, and up to the Highgate underground station on Archway Road. None of these people on their way to work had seen anything unusual on the morning of the day that Davey Benton’s body had been found. Several of them mentioned a man, a woman, and two men together-all of them walking dogs in the woods-but that was the extent of what they had to offer, and it did not include any descriptions, of either man or beast.

From the houses along Wood Lane leading up to the park, similarly nothing had been gleaned. It was a quiet area in the dead of night, and nothing had apparently altered that silence on the night of Davey’s murder. This information was disheartening to everyone on the team, but better news came from the officer who’d taken the assignment to interview everyone in Walden Lodge, the small block of flats on the edge of Queen’s Wood.

It was nothing to celebrate, the officer told everyone, but a bloke called Berkeley Pears-“There’s a name for you,” one of the other constables muttered-had a Jack Russell terrier that had started barking at three forty-five in the morning. “This was inside his flat, not outside,” the constable added. “Pears thought someone might be on the balcony, so he took up a carving knife and went to see. He’s sure he saw a flash of light down the hillside. On and off and on again, but shielded, like. He thought it was taggers or someone making their way to or from Archway Road. He got the dog quiet, and that was the end of it.”

“Three forty-five explains why none of the commuters saw anything,” John Stewart said to Lynley.

“Yes. Well. We’ve known from the first that he operates in the small hours,” Lynley said. “Anything else from Walden Lodge, Kevin?”

“A woman called Janet Castle says she thinks she heard a cry or a shriek round midnight. Operative word thinks. She watches a lot of telly, crime dramas and the like. I think she’s a frustrated DCI Tennison, without the sex appeal.”

“Just one cry?”

“That’s what she said.”

“Man, woman, child?”

“She couldn’t tell.”

“The two men in the woods…those who were walking the dog in the morning…they’re a possibility,” Lynley said. He didn’t elucidate but rather told the reporting constable to go back for further information from the commuter who’d sighted them. “What else?” he asked the others.

“That old bloke the tagger saw in the allotments?” came the reply from another of the Queen’s Wood constables. “Turned out to be seventy-two years old and no way the killer. He can barely walk. Talks, though. I couldn’t shut him up.”

“What did he see? Anything?”

“The tagger. That’s all he wanted to talk about as well. Seems he’s phoned the cops over and over again about the little bugger but, according to him, they never do a damn thing because they have better things to occupy their time than catching vandals who happen to be defacing public property that’s enjoyed by all.”

Lynley turned to the Walden Lodge constable curiously. “Anyone inside talk about that tagger, Kevin?”

Kevin shook his head. He glanced at his notes, however, and said, “I only talked to residents of eight of the flats, though. As to the other two, one is newly empty and for sale and the other belongs to a lady taking her annual holiday in Spain.”

Lynley considered this and saw the possibility. “Get on to the estate agents in the area. See who’s been shown that empty flat.”

He shared with the team a further report from SO7 that had been waiting for him on his desk when he’d arrived that morning. The hair on Davey Benton’s body belonged to a cat, he told them. Additionally, there was no match between the tyres of Barry Minshall’s van and the tracks left in St. George’s Gardens. But there was a van out there that they were still seeking, and it looked as if it may have been purchased precisely for the use to which it was being put: a mobile killing site.

“At the time of Kimmo Thorne’s death, it appears that the van was still registered to the previous owner, Muwaffaq Masoud. Someone out there has possession of that vehicle, and we’ve got to find it.”

“You want the details released now, Tommy?” It was John Stewart who asked the question. “If we put that van in the public eye…” He made a gesture that said, You can figure out the rest.