"That's what Harry told you? I wouldn't exactly call it a row, but Harry likes his bit of drama-What?" He had caught some telltale flicker in their faces. "What aren't you telling me?"

"Harry's dead, Dom," answered Kincaid. "Just like Kristin. Where were you last night between midnight and two?"

Kerry Boatman greeted Gemma with a warm smile as she ushered her into her office. "I didn't expect to see you back so soon. Is it the Cahill case?"

"It's actually not about that at all," admitted Gemma, taking a seat. "Or only in a very odd and roundabout way. My friend who claims the brooch Kristin Cahill put into the sale at Harrowby's…well, I've just learned from another source that her husband was murdered here in Chelsea, after the war. I don't see any obvious connection, but I thought I should know more before I spoke to my friend. Don't want to put my foot in it." She smiled, feeling an idiot. "I wondered if I might look through your files. His name was David Rosenthal."

"And the year?"

"I don't exactly know. Say within ten years after the war?"

Boatman raised both brows and peered at Gemma over the tops of the reading glasses she'd perched on her nose. "Good God, Inspector, have you any idea of the state of our records?"

"Well, if they're anything like ours…" Gemma looked down at the pretty skirt and top she'd put on that morning, and shrugged.

Boatman grinned. "You'll find them in the basement. Enjoy."

"So what did you think?" Kincaid asked Cullen when they were back in the car.

Cullen gave a snort of disgust. "Total bollocks."

Dom had not repeated his dramatic faint, but he had gone white as a Victorian damsel and said he refused to believe Harry was dead. When Kincaid had told him that the police didn't usually lie about things like that, Dom had just shaken his head like an obstinate child.

"I'm afraid it's true, and I am sorry," Kincaid had said. "And we still need to know where you were last night."

"I was here. What would I be doing, with Kristin dead?"

"Did you drive your mother's car?"

Dom looked as horrified as when they'd told him Harry was dead. "Are you out of your mind? And even if I were that daft, her car's been in the garage for two weeks, waiting on a part from Germany."

Cullen had got the name of the garage. Now he said, "Want me to check out the car, guv?"

"Yes, and see if you can find any mobile records for Harry Pevensey. There was no mobile phone on his body and we didn't see one in the flat." To Kincaid's astonishment, the phone in Pevensey's flat had been rotary dial. No wonder Cullen hadn't reached an answering machine.

"What about Amir Khan?" asked Cullen. "I talked to my mate in Fraud. He said the salesroom has skirted the law a number of times, falsifying imports, documentation, and so on. What if Khan knew more about the brooch than he let on? Could he have recognized it as stolen and allowed it in the sale anyway? I could have sworn he looked worried this morning."

"I'm not sure Erika ever reported it as stolen." Kincaid glanced at his watch. "I need to check with Gemma, and before we tackle Mr. Khan again, I'd like to know a little more about Harry Pevensey. I think I'd like to check out the bar where Dom Scott said they met, the French House."

By the time Gemma found David Rosenthal's case file, her back hurt, her fingers were grimy, and the smell of old dust seemed permanently embedded in her nostrils.

"Why the hell couldn't the Met pay some low-grade clerk to sit in the dungeon all day and transfer the bloody things to computer?" she'd groused when she first began searching the boxed files.

But when she had taken the box to the table, sat down in the utilitarian chair provided, and finally held David Rosenthal's file in her hands, she changed her mind. Slowly she shuffled through the pages. Typed reports, with the occasional uncorrected error. Handwritten notes by the senior detective in charge of the case, an inspector named Gavin Hoxley. It all felt suddenly, undeniably, real.

David Rosenthal, she read, had been found lying on the ground beside a bench in Cheyne Gardens, on a Saturday night in May 1952. He had apparently been robbed of all his belongings, so that he had not been identified until his wife reported him missing.

His wife. Erika. Good God.

He had been stabbed multiple times with a double-edged blade, the reports went on, and was thought by the pathologist to have died instantly. There had been no defensive wounds.

He had lived in Notting Hill, and the address was the same as Erika's house in Arundel Gardens. He had worked in North Hampstead, and had spent any free time at the British Museum. There was no known reason for him to have been in Chelsea on that Saturday evening.

And then Gemma came to the photos. This-this had been Erika's husband. Even in monochrome, the crime scene photos were brutal, the blood on his shirt front starkly black against the white of the fabric and his blanched face. But even in death she could see that David Rosenthal had been striking, handsome in a fine-boned, careworn sort of way.

Why had she never seen a photo of him in Erika's flat? Not even a wedding portrait. And Gemma, doing a quick calculation, guessed that Erika had been only in her thirties when her husband had been killed. Why had she never remarried? Had David Rosenthal been the great love of her life, never to be replaced?

And why had she, Gemma, never thought to ask?

Pushing back her chair, Gemma separated Gavin Hoxley's notes from the other papers. He had made jottings to himself, just as she kept running commentary in her own notebooks, and his handwriting was well formed, with a bold downstroke. It made her think he had been a careful man, but determined, perhaps even obstinate, and she smiled at her amateur analysis.

She had just begun to read when her phone beeped, telling her she had a text message waiting, and she realized that she had been without a signal until she moved her chair. Her first thought was that she had missed some news about her mum, but the message was from Kincaid, asking if she could meet him at an address in Dean Street.

Kincaid leaned against the lamppost in front of the French House, looking up at the cheerful blue awnings above the bar. The windows of the upstairs dining room were thrown wide to let in the air, but the French flags flying over the first floor gave only a desultory flutter in the warm air.

He had taken off his jacket, and glanced with some dismay at the crush of customers spilling from the doorway of the bar and into the street. If it was warm outside, it would be warmer still within, and any thoughts he'd had of a cool drink and something to eat while they chatted with the staff were probably doomed to logistical failure.

Still, he was not, like Cullen, on his way back to a stuffy office in the Yard to subpoena phone records. The thought made him grin. Cullen had wanted to be in on this interview, and hadn't hesitated to protest.

But Cullen was good at detail-as Kincaid had reminded him-and ferreting out facts was an important part of a sergeant's job.

And the rebellion augured well for future promotion, but in the meantime Cullen had a ways to go in developing patience, and in Kincaid's opinion, empathy. He was quick to judge, and lacked Gemma's intuitive desire to understand what made people tick.

But then Kincaid knew that he would probably always, and perhaps unfairly, use Gemma as a benchmark for a partner's performance, and he realized how readily he had jumped on an excuse to pull Gemma in on this case. Perhaps he couldn't blame Cullen for being touchy.