“Just the sort of thing the tabloids love,” Lynley said bitterly.

“But they’re carrying the public along with them, Tommy. Someone is going to see the pictures from the CCTV camera and turn the boys in.”

Lynley said, “The boys?”

St. James nodded. “At least one of them, apparently, was a boy. The au pair says he looked about twelve years old.”

“Oh my God.” Lynley looked away, as if this would prevent his mind from making the inescapable connection.

St. James made it anyway. “One of the Colossus boys…? In the company of the serial killer but without knowing his companion is the serial killer?”

“I gave him-them-an invitation to my home. Right in the pages of The Source, Simon.”

“But there was no address, no street name. A killer looking for you couldn’t have found you through that article. It’s impossible.”

“He knew who I was, what I look like as well. He could have followed me home from the Yard on any day. And then all that would be left for him was laying his plan and waiting for an appropriate time.”

“If that’s the case, why take a boy with him?”

“To give him a sin. So he could be his next victim when the job on Helen was done.”

THEY’D DECIDED to let Hamish Robson stew for a night in lockup. It would be something of a taste of the future. So they’d taken the profiler to the Shepherdess Walk police station which, while it wasn’t the closest lockup to his flat near the Barbican, allowed them to avoid negotiating a route which would take them deeper into the City to get to the Wood Street station.

Search warrant in hand, they spent most of the following day in Robson’s flat, building their case against the psychologist. One of the first bits of evidence they found was his laptop computer squirreled away in a cupboard, and Barbara made short work of tripping along the trail of electronic bread crumbs that Robson had left upon it.

“Kiddy porn,” she said to Nkata over her shoulder when she found the first of the images. “Boys and men, boys and women, boys and animals, boys and boys. He’s a real piece of work, our Hamish.”

For his part, Nkata found an old A to Z with the location of St. Lucy’s Church circled on the corner of Courtfield Road. And tucked into its pages was the name and address of the Canterbury Hotel as well as a business card with “Snow” and a phone number printed on it.

This, along with Barry Minshall’s earlier identification of Robson’s photograph and 2160 as part of the phone number of the doctor’s employer, was enough to bring a SOCO team onto the scene and to send another to Walden Lodge. The first would be looking for further evidence in Robson’s car. The second would be gathering what it could from his mother’s flat. It seemed unlikely that he’d have brought Davey Benton or anyone else into his digs here near the Barbican. But at least Davey would have ridden over to Wood Lane with Robson and, once there, he would have left his mark inside Esther Robson’s flat.

When they had enough to put him away as a paedophile if nothing else, they went to the station. He’d already phoned for his solicitor, and after a wait for her to turn up from the magistrate’s court, Barbara and Nkata met them both in an interview room.

It was, Barbara thought, a nice touch for Robson to employ a female solicitor. She was called Amy Stranne, and she appeared to have achieved an advanced university degree in impassivity. She matched her utter lack of expressive reaction with a severe, short haircut, an equally severe black suit, and a man’s tie knotted at the throat of her white silk shirt. She took a pristine legal pad from her briefcase, along with a manila folder whose contents she consulted before speaking.

“I’ve advised my client of his rights,” she said. “He wishes to cooperate with you in this interview because he feels there are significant aspects of the current investigation that you don’t understand.”

Too right, Barbara thought. Bless his black little heart. The psychologist knew he was going to be locked up for years. Like Minshall, the slimy sod was already trying to position himself for a lesser sentence.

Nkata said, “We got SOCO sifting through your vehicle, Dr. Robson. We got SOCO sifting through your mum’s flat. We got a team at the Yard searching for the lockup you got to have somewhere in town, because we ’xpect that’s where you got the van hidden, and we got ’bout half a dozen officers treading through your background to find anything anyone else might miss.”

Robson’s haggard face suggested that his accommodation in Shepherdess Walk hadn’t been to his liking. He said, “I didn’t-”

“Please,” Barbara said. “If you didn’t kill Davey Benton, we’d be happy to hear what actually happened to him between the time you raped him and the time he ended up a body in the woods.”

Robson flinched at the baldness of the statement. Barbara wanted to point out to him that there was actually no palatable way to portray what had happened to the thirteen-year-old. Robson said, “I didn’t mean to hurt him.”

“Him?”

“The boy. Davey. Snow told me they always went willingly. He said they were well prepared.”

“Like a joint of beef?” Barbara asked. “All salt-and-peppered?”

“He said they were ready and they wanted it.”

“It?” Nkata said.

“The encounter.”

“The rape,” Barbara clarified.

“It wasn’t…!” Robson looked to his solicitor. Amy Stranne was taking notes, but she appeared to sense his glance in her direction, because she looked up. She said, “It’s up to you, Hamish.”

“You’ve got healed scratches on your hands and arms,” Barbara noted. “And we’ve got skin under Davey’s fingernails. We’ve evidence of forcible sodomy as well. So what is it about this scenario that we ought to be taking as a voluntary sexual encounter…not that sex with thirteen-year-olds is legal, by the way. But we’re willing to set that aside for a moment if only to hear your version of the romantic seduction which apparently-”

“I didn’t intend to hurt him,” Robson said. “I panicked. That’s all. He’d been cooperative. He’d been enjoying…Perhaps he was hesitant, but he wasn’t telling me to stop. He wasn’t. I swear he was liking it. But when I turned him round…” Robson’s face was grey. His thin hair drooped across his forehead. Spittle dried at the corners of his mouth, buried within his nicely trimmed goatee. “I just tried to keep him quiet after that. I told him the first time was always a little frightening, even a little painful, but he wasn’t to worry.”

“How nice of you,” Barbara noted. She wanted to rip the sorry bugger’s eyes out. Next to her, Nkata stirred. She told herself to back off, which she knew her colleague was also telling her through his body language. But she didn’t want this sod to think that their silence-her silence-implied approval, even though she knew her silence was crucial in order to keep him talking. She pressed her lips together and bit down to keep them in place.

“I should have stopped then,” Robson said. “I know it. But at the moment…I thought if he would just be quiet, it would be over quickly enough. And I wanted…” Robson looked away, but there was nothing in the room for him to fix upon save the tape recorder making a history of his words. “I didn’t intend to kill him,” he said again. “I just wanted him to keep quiet while…”

“While you finished with him,” Barbara said.

“You strangled him with your bare hands,” Nkata pointed out. “How was that supposed to-”

“I didn’t know how else to get him silent. He was only struggling at first, but then he began to scream and I didn’t know how else to quieten him. And then as things were…were building for me…I didn’t realise why he’d gone so silent and limp. I thought he was cooperating.”

“Cooperating.” Barbara couldn’t help herself. “With sodomy. Rape. A thirteen-year-old. You thought he was cooperating. So you finished the job, only you found you were plugging away at a corpse.”