Robson’s eyes reddened. “My whole life,” he’d said, “I tried to ignore…I told myself it didn’t matter: my uncle, the wrestling and the touching. My mother wanting to sleep with her little man and the arousal that was natural to any boy only how could it have been natural when she was making it happen? So I ignored it and I eventually married, but I didn’t want her, you see, the woman, fully formed and making demands of me. I thought pictures would help. Videos. Dodgy things that no one would know about.”

“Kiddy porn,” Barbara said.

“I could get aroused. Easily at first. But then later…”

“Takes more,” Nkata said. “Always takes more, like a drug. How’d you get on to MABIL?”

“Through the Internet. A chat room. I went at first just to see, just to be round men who felt as I felt. I’d borne the burden so long. This obscene need. I thought it would cure me if I went and saw the sorts of men who…who actually engage in it.” He brought a tissue out of his pocket and used it to scrub at his face. “But they were just like me, you see. That was the hell of it. They were like me, only happier. At peace. They’d arrived at a spot where they’d come to believe there is no sin in bodily pleasure.”

“Bodily pleasure with little boys,” Barbara said. “And why would that be? The no sin part of it.”

“Because the boys learn to want it as well.”

“Do they now. And how is it that blokes like you measure the wanting, Dr. Robson?”

“I can see you don’t believe…that you think I’m-”

“A monster? A freak? A genetic mutant who needs to be wiped from the surface of the earth along with the rest of your ilk? Why the hell would I think that?” Finally, it was all too much for her.

“Barb,” Nkata said.

He was so like Lynley, she thought. Capable of keeping cool when that was called for, the one thing she’d never been able to do because she’d always associated keeping cool with letting your insides get eaten by the horror you felt when you had to deal with monsters like this.

“Tell us about the rest,” Nkata said to Robson.

“There’s nothing more to tell. I waited as long as I could, far into the night. I carried the…his body into the woods. It was three…four in the morning? There was no one anywhere.”

“The burning, the mutilation. Tell us about that.”

“I wanted to make it look like the others. Once I saw I’d accidentally killed him, that was the only thing I could think. Make it look like the others so you would conclude the same killer was at work on Davey as on them.”

“Hang on. Are you trying to claim you didn’t kill the other boys?” Barbara asked.

Robson frowned. “You haven’t thought…You haven’t been sitting there thinking I’m the serial killer? How on earth can that be? How could I even have had access to those other boys?”

“You tell us.”

“I did tell you. From the profile, I told you.”

They were silent. He made the leap to what the silence implied.

“My God, the profile’s real. Why would I ever have made that up?”

“Most obvious reason in the world,” Nkata said. “Lays a nice trail away from yourself.”

“But I didn’t even know those boys, those dead boys. I didn’t know them. You must believe-”

“What about Muwaffaq Masoud?” Nkata asked. “You know him?”

“Muwaf…? I’ve never…Who is he?”

“Someone who might be able to pick you out of an identity parade,” Nkata said. “Been a while since he’s seen the bloke who bought a van off him, but I ’xpect having the man in front of him might do to jog his memory a bit.”

Robson turned to his solicitor then. He said, “They can’t…Can they do this? I’ve cooperated. I’ve told them everything.”

“So you say, Dr. Robson,” Barbara put in. “But we’ve found liars and killers’re cut from similar cloth, so don’t mind us for not taking your word as gospel.”

“You’ve got to listen to me,” Robson protested. “The one boy, yes. But it was an accident. I didn’t intend it to happen. The others, though…I am not a murderer. You’re looking for someone…Read the profile. Read the profile. I am not the person you’re looking for. I know you’re under pressure to bring this case to a close, and now that the superintendent’s wife has been assaulted-”

“The superintendent’s wife is dead,” Nkata reminded him. “You forget that for some reason?”

“You’re not suggesting…” He turned to Amy Stranne. “Get me away from them,” he said. “I won’t speak to them further. They’re trying to make me something I’m not.”

“That’s what they all say, Dr. Robson,” Barbara told him. “In a pinch, blokes like you always whistle the exact same tune.”

TWO MEMBERS of the board of trustees came to see her, which told Ulrike that trouble was not just brewing, it was steaming in the carafe. The president of the board, dressed to the nines with everything but the requisite gold chain to illustrate his authority, had the board secretary in tow. Patrick Bensley was doing the talking, while his cohort tried to look like someone more substantial than an entrepreneur’s socialite wife, her recent face-lift on tight display.

It didn’t take long for Ulrike to understand that Neil Greenham had made good on the threats he’d uttered the last time they’d spoken. She’d reached that conclusion when Jack Veness told her that Mr. Bensley and Mrs. Richie were unexpectedly in reception, asking for a word with the Colossus director. What took her longer was sorting out exactly which one of the threats Neil had acted upon. Was she to be taken to task for her affair with Griffin Strong or for something else?

She’d seen Griff only briefly in the past few days. He’d kept himself busy with his new group of assessment kids and when he wasn’t involved with them, he was out of the way and busily engaged in outreach work, silk-screening work, or the sort of social work he’d been asked to do a thousand times since signing on at Colossus. He’d always been too busy to see to that latter aspect of his job before now. It was astounding how tragedies managed to illustrate for people exactly how much time they’d in fact had for preventing tragedies in the first place. In Griff’s case, it was taking the time to connect with his assessment clients and their families outside the regular Colossus hours. He was good about that now, or so he claimed. Truth was, he could have been bonking Emma the Brick Lane Bengali hostess every time he was gone from Colossus, for all Ulrike knew. Or cared, for that matter. She had larger concerns now. And wasn’t that an additionally intriguing twist in life? A man one would have sacrificed nearly everything for turned out to have the value of a dust mote when one’s head finally cleared.

But the clearing had come at too great a cost. And it turned out that was why Mr. Bensley and Mrs. Richie had come to call. Which visit in and of itself wouldn’t have been so bad had she not already been visited that day by the police.

This time it was Belgravia, not New Scotland Yard. They turned up in the form of an unfriendly detective inspector called Jansen with a constable in attendance, who remained nameless and wordless throughout the interview. Jansen had produced a photograph for Ulrike to inspect.

In the picture, which was grainy but not impossible to make out, two individuals were caught in the act of apparently jogging down a narrow street. The identical houses along it-all of them only two and three floors tall-suggested the action had occurred in a mews. The subjects of the photo were in an affluent part of town, as well: There was no rubbish or litter visible, no graffiti, no dead plants in decrepit window boxes.

Ulrike reckoned she was meant to say whether she recognised the individuals who were rushing by the CCTV camera that had produced their photo. So she studied them.

The taller of the two-and he seemed to be male-had sussed out the presence of the camera and wisely averted his face. He wore a hat pulled low over his head. He had his jacket collar turned up, wore gloves, and was otherwise dressed completely in black. He might as well have been a shadow.