“This’s about the boy in the woods? I’ve already told them what little I know.”

“Yeah. Got it. But another set of ears…? You never know what’s going to turn up.”

“Very well,” he said. “Come in if you must. Pearlie?”-this in the direction of the kitchen-“Come, darling.”

The dog trotted out, bright eyed and friendly, as if she hadn’t been a nasty little killing machine only moments before. She jumped into her master’s arms and stuck her nose in the breast pocket of his tattersall shirt. He chuckled and dug in another pocket for her treat, which she swallowed without chewing.

Berkeley Pears was a type, there was no doubt of it, Barbara thought. He probably wore patent-leather shoes and an overcoat with a velvet collar when he left his digs. You saw his kind occasionally on the tube. They carried furled umbrellas, which they used as walking sticks, they read the Financial Times as if it meant something to them, and they never looked up till they reached their destination.

He showed her into his sitting room: three-piece suite in position, coffee table arranged with copies of Country Life and a Treasures of the Uffizi art book, modern lamps with metal shades at precise angles suitable for reading. Nothing was out of place in here, and Barbara assumed nothing dared to be…although three noticeable yellowish stains on the carpet gave testimony to at least one of Pearl’s less than salubrious canine activities.

Pears said, “I wouldn’t’ve seen a thing, you understand, if it hadn’t been for Pearl. And you’d think I’d get a thank-you for that, but all I’ve heard is, ‘The dog must go.’ As if cats are less of a bother”-he said cats the way others said cockroaches-“when all the time that creature in number five howls morning and night like it’s being skewered. Siamese. Well. What else would you expect? She leaves the little beast for weeks, while I’ve never left Pearl for so much as an hour. Not an hour, mind you, but does that count? No. One night when she barks and I can’t quieten her quick enough and that is it. Someone complains-as if they don’t all have contraband animals, the lot of them-and I get a visit from management. No animals allowed. The dog must go. Well, we intend to fight them to the very death, I tell you. Pearl goes, I go.”

That, Barbara thought, might have been the master plan. She wedged her way into the conversation. “What did you see that night, Mr. Pears? What happened?”

Pears took the sofa, where he cradled the terrier like a baby and scratched her chest. He indicated the chair for Barbara. He said, “I assumed it was a break-in at first. Pearl began…One can only describe it as hysterical. She was simply hysterical. She woke me from a perfectly sound sleep and frightened me to bits. She was flinging herself-believe me, there is no other word for it-at the balcony doors and barking like nothing I’ve ever heard from her before or since. So you can see why…”

“What did you do?”

He looked marginally embarrassed. “I rather…well, I armed myself. With a carving knife, which was all I had. I went to the doors and tried to see out, but there was nothing. I opened them, and that’s what caused the trouble because Pearl went outside on the balcony and continued barking like a she-devil and I couldn’t get a grip on her and keep hold of the knife, so it all took a bit of time.”

“And in the woods?”

“There was a light. A few flashes. It’s all I saw. Here. Let me show you.”

The balcony opened off the sitting room, its large sliding window covered by a set of blinds. Pears raised these and opened the door. Pearl scrambled from his arms onto the balcony and commenced barking, much as described. She yapped at an ear-piercing volume. Barbara could understand why the other residents had complained. A cat was nothing in comparison with this.

Pears grabbed the Jack Russell and held her snout. She managed to bark anyway. He said, “The light was over there, through those trees and down the hill. It has to have been when the body…well, you know. And Pearl knew it. She could sense it. That’s the only explanation. Pearl. Darling. That is enough.”

Pears stepped back inside the flat with the dog and waited for Barbara to do likewise. For her part, though, Barbara remained on the balcony. The woods began to dip down the hillside directly behind Walden Lodge, she saw, but that would be something one would not know from looking at the lodge from the street. The trees grew in abundance here, offering what would be a thick screen in summer but what was now a crosshatching of branches bare in midwinter. Directly below them and right up to the brick wall that defined the edge of the lodge’s property, shrubbery grew unrestrained, making access from Walden Lodge into the woods a virtual impossibility. A killer would have had to thrash through everything from holly to bracken in order to get from here to the spot where the body had been dumped, and no killer worth his salt-let alone a bloke who’d so far managed to eliminate six youths and leave virtually no evidence behind when he dumped their bodies-would have attempted that. He would have deposited a treasure trove of useful clues in his wake. And he hadn’t done so.

Barbara stood there thoughtfully, surveying the scene. She considered everything that Berkeley Pears had told her. Nothing he’d reported was out of place, but there was one detail that she didn’t quite understand.

She reentered the flat, pulling the balcony door closed behind her. She said to Pears, “There was a cry of some sort heard sometime after midnight from one of the flats. We’ve had that information from the interviews we’ve done with all the residents in this building. You’ve not mentioned it.”

He shook his head. “I didn’t hear it.”

“What about Pearl?”

“What about her?”

“If she heard the disturbance in the woods at this distance-”

“I suggest she sensed it rather than heard it,” Pears corrected.

“All right. We’ll say she sensed it. But then why didn’t she sense something wrong in the building round midnight when someone cried out?”

“Possibly because no one did.”

“Yet someone heard it. Round midnight. What d’you make of that?”

“A desire to help the police, a dream, a mistake. Something that didn’t happen. Because if it did, and if it was out of the ordinary, Pearl would have reacted. Good grief, you saw how she was with you.”

“That’s how she always is when there’s a knock at the door?”

“Under some conditions.”

“What would those be?”

“If she doesn’t know who’s on the other side.”

“And if she does know? If she hears a voice or smells a scent and recognises it?”

“Then she makes no noise. Which was why, you see, her barking at three forty-five in the morning was so unusual.”

“Because if she doesn’t bark, it means she knows what she’s seeing, hearing, or smelling?”

“That’s right,” Pears said. “But I don’t actually see what this has to do with anything, Constable Havers.”

“That’s okay in the scheme of things, Mr. Pears,” Barbara said. “Fact is, I do.”