“We should have stayed with you, at the hospital,” Lady Asherton murmured.

“No,” Lynley said. “You did what I asked.” He looked out of the window. “I’ll want to bury them at Howenstow. I think that’s what she would have wanted. We never discussed it. There was no need. But I’d like-”

He felt his mother’s hand take his. “Of course,” she said.

“I don’t know when yet. I didn’t think to ask when they’d release the…her body. There are all sorts of details…”

“We’ll handle things, Tommy,” his brother said. “All of them. Let us.”

Lynley looked at him. Peter was leaning forward, closer to him than he’d been in ages. Slowly he nodded his agreement. “Some of them, then,” he said. “Thank you.”

They rode the rest of the way in silence. When the taxi made the turn from Victoria Street into Broadway, Lady Asherton spoke again. She said, “Will you let one of us come in with you, Tommy?”

“There’s no need,” he told her. “I’ll be all right, Mum.”

He waited till they drove off before he entered. Then he went inside, not to Victoria Block but to Tower Block. He made his way to Hillier’s office.

Judi MacIntosh looked up from her work. Like his mother, she seemed to be able to read him, and it appeared that what she read was accurate, for he had not come for a confrontation. She said, “Superintendent, I…All of us here…I can’t imagine what you’re going through.” She held her hands at her throat, as if beseeching him to relieve her of saying anything more.

He said, “Thank you,” and he wondered how many more times he would have to thank people in the coming months. Indeed, he wondered what he was even thanking them for. His breeding called for this expression of gratitude when he wanted instead to raise his head and shriek into the eternal night that was falling round him. He despised good breeding. But even despising it, he relied upon it again when he said, “Would you tell him I’m here? I’d like a word. It won’t take long.”

She nodded. Rather than phone into Hillier’s office, however, she went through the door. She closed it softly behind her. A minute passed. Another. They were probably phoning someone to come up. Nkata again. Perhaps John Stewart. Someone capable of restraining him. Someone to escort him from the premises.

Judi MacIntosh returned. “Do go in,” she said.

Hillier wasn’t in his usual position, behind the desk. He wasn’t standing at one of the windows. Instead, he’d come across the carpet to meet Lynley halfway. He said quietly, “Thomas, you must go home and get some rest. You can’t continue-”

“I know.” Lynley couldn’t recall the last time he’d slept. He’d been running on anxiety and adrenaline for so long he no longer remembered what it felt like to be doing otherwise. He removed his warrant card and every other vestige of police identification that he had upon him. He extended them to the assistant commissioner.

Hillier looked at them but did not take them. “I won’t accept this,” he said. “You’ve not been thinking straight. You’re not thinking straight now. I can’t allow you to make a decision like this-”

“Believe me, sir,” Lynley cut in, “I’ve made far more difficult decisions.” He passed Hillier then and went to his desk. He lay his identification upon it.

“Thomas,” Hillier said, “don’t do this. Take some time off. Take compassionate leave. With everything that’s happened, you can’t be in a position to decide your future or anyone else’s.”

Lynley felt the hollowness of a laugh rising in him. He could decide. He had decided.

He wanted to say that he didn’t know any longer how to be, let alone who to be. He wanted to explain he was good for no one and nothing now and he did not know if things would ever be any different. Instead what he said was, “For my part of what went between us, sir, I am most deeply regretful.”

“Thomas…” The tone of Hillier’s voice-was it pained? It actually sounded so-stopped him at the door. He turned. Hillier said, “Where will you go?”

“To Cornwall,” he said. “I’m taking them home.”

Hillier nodded then. He said something more as Lynley opened the door. He couldn’t have been certain what the words were, but later he would think they’d been “Go with God.”

Outside, in the anteroom, Barbara Havers was waiting. She looked done in, and it came to Lynley that at this point she’d been working more than twenty-four hours straight. She said, “Sir…”

“I’m fine, Barbara. You needn’t have come up.”

“I’m to take you somewhere.”

“Where?”

“Just…They’re suggesting I drive you home. I’ve a car on loan, so you won’t have to cram yourself into my heap.”

“That’s fine, then,” Lynley said. “Let’s go.”

He felt her hand on his elbow, guiding him from the office to the lift. She spoke to him as they went along, and he gathered from her words that there was evidence aplenty to link Kilfoyle to the deaths of the Colossus boys.

“And the rest?” he asked her as the lift doors opened on the underground carpark. “What about the rest?”

And she spoke of Hamish Robson and then of the boy in lockup at the Harrow Road station. Robson’s was a crime of necessity and opportunity, she said. As for the boy in Harrow Road, he wouldn’t say.

“But there’s no connection at all between him and Colossus,” Havers said as they reached the car. They continued talking over its roof, her on one side and him on the other. “It looks like…Sir, it looks to everyone like a one-off street crime. He won’t talk…this kid. But we’re thinking it’s a gang.”

He looked at her. She seemed underwater to him, and at a great distance. “A gang? Doing what?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know.”

“But you have an idea. You must. Tell me.”

“Car’s unlocked, sir.”

“Barbara, tell me.”

She opened her door but didn’t climb inside. “It could’ve been an initiation, sir. He needed to prove something to someone, and Helen was there. She was just…there.”

Lynley knew from this there was supposed to come absolution for himself, but he could not feel it. He said, “Take me to Harrow Road, then.”

She said, “You don’t need to-”

“Take me to Harrow Road, Barbara.”

She gazed at him and then got into the car. She started it up. She said, “The Bentley…”

“You put it to good use,” he told her. “Well done, Constable.”

“It’s to be Sergeant again,” she said. “Finally.”

He said, “Sergeant,” and he felt his lips curve slightly. “Well done, Sergeant Havers.”

Her own lips trembled and he saw her chin dimple. She said, “Right. Well.” She got them out of the carpark and on their way.

If she worried that he was going to do something rash, she gave no sign of it. Instead she told him how Ulrike Ellis had got herself into the company of Robbie Kilfoyle, and from there she went on to say that the announcement of the arrest had been handed over to John Stewart to make before the media once Nkata refused to do it. “Stewart’s moment of glory, sir,” was how she concluded. “I think he’s been waiting for stardom for years.”

“Keep on his good side,” Lynley told her. “I don’t want to think of you with enemies in the future.”

She glanced at him. He could see what she feared. He wished he could tell her the situation was otherwise.

In the Harrow Road station, Lynley told her what he wanted. She listened, nodded, and in an act of friendship he welcomed with gratitude, she did not try to talk him out of it. When strings had been pulled and arrangements had been made, she came to fetch him. As she’d done in Victoria Street, she walked along at his side, her hand lightly upon his elbow.

She said, “In here, sir,” and opened a door to a dimly lit room. Beyond it, on the other side of the two-way mirror, Helen’s killer sat. They’d given him a plastic bottle of juice, but he hadn’t opened it. He had his hands clasped round it, and his shoulders were slumped.