Lynley said carefully, “I see that. But there’s another connection Barbara’s come up with, and I think you’ll agree it’s worth looking at.”

“And this connection is?”

Lynley told her about a magazine and its photos of the opening of the Cadbury Photographic Portrait of the Year show. He told her about Frazer Chaplin in those pictures, and there, in the background, Gina Dickens. He concluded with, “It seemed best to let her go to Hampshire. If nothing else, she can get us photos of Jossie, Ringo Heath, and Whiting to show round Stoke Newington. And to show to Matsumoto. But, knowing Barbara, she’s likely to come up with more than that.”

“Is she indeed,” Isabelle said. “Thank you, Inspector. I’ll chat with her later.” She looked at the rest of them and read on their faces the varying degrees of discomfort. She said to them, “The lot of you have your activities for tomorrow. We’ll speak again in the afternoon.”

She left them. She heard her name called as she strode to her office. She recognised Lynley’s voice but she waved him off. “I need to deal with DI Stewart,” she told him, “and then with Hillier. And that, believe me, is all I can cope with today.” She turned quickly before he could reply. She’d not made it to her office door when Dorothea Harriman told her that the assistant commissioner had personally just phoned-the emphasis she placed on personally expressing the urgency of the communication-and he was giving the superintendent a choice: She could either come to his office at once or he could come to hers.

“I took the liberty…,” Dorothea said meaningfully. “Because with all due respect, Detective Superintendent Ardery, you don’t want the assistant commissioner coming-”

“Tell him I’m on my way.”

John Stewart, Isabelle decided, would have to wait. Briefly, she wondered how her day could possibly become worse, but she reckoned she was about to find out.

THE KEY WAS to hold things together for another hour or so. Isabelle told herself she was capable of that. She didn’t need to fortify herself for a final sixty minutes at the Yard. She might have wanted to but she didn’t need to. Want and need were completely different.

At AC Hillier’s office, Judi MacIntosh told her to go straight in. The assistant commissioner was expecting her, she said, and did she want tea or a coffee? Isabelle accepted tea with milk and sugar. She reckoned that being able to drink it without her hands shaking would make a statement about the control she was maintaining over the situation.

Hillier was sitting behind his desk. He nodded towards his conference table, and he told her they would wait for Stephenson Deacon’s arrival. Hillier joined her there when Isabelle sat. He had several telephone messages in his hand, slips of paper that he laid out on the table in front of him and made a show of studying. The office door opened after two minutes’ tense silence, and Judi MacIntosh came in with Isabelle’s tea: cup and saucer, milk jug and sugar, stainless steel spoon. These would be trickier to handle than a plastic or Styrofoam cup. This teacup would rattle on its saucer when she lifted it, sounding a betrayal. Very clever, Isabelle thought.

“Please enjoy your tea,” Hillier told her. She reckoned his tone was similar to that which Socrates heard prior to the hemlock.

She took milk but decided against the sugar. Sugar would have required her dexterous use of the spoon, and she didn’t think she could manage that. As it was, when she stirred the milk into the tea, the sound of steel hitting china seemed earsplitting. She didn’t dare raise the cup to her lips. She set the spoon in the saucer and waited.

It was less than five minutes before Stephenson Deacon joined them although it seemed much longer. He nodded at her and sank into a chair, placing a manila folder in front of him. His hair was thin and the colour of mouse fur and he ran his hands through it as he said, “Well,” after which he leveled a gaze at her and added, “We do have something of a problem, Superintendent Ardery.”

The problem had two parts and the head of the press bureau shed light upon them without further prefatory remarks. The first part constituted unauthorised deal making. The second part constituted the result of that unauthorised deal making. Both were equally damaging to the Met.

“Damaging to the Met” had nothing to do with real damage, Isabelle quickly discovered. It did not mean the police had lost any power over the criminal element. Rather, damage to the Met meant damage to the image of the Met, and whenever the Met’s image was sullied, the sullying generally came from the press.

In this case, what the press were reporting appeared to have come verbatim from Zaynab Bourne. She had embraced the deal offered by Detective Superintendent Isabelle Ardery at St. Thomas’ Hospital: unfettered access to Yukio Matsumoto in exchange for the Met’s admission of culpability for the Japanese man’s flight and his subsequent injuries. The final edition of the Evening Standard was leading with the story, but unfortunately the Standard was leading with only half of it and that was the culpability half. “Met Admits Wrongdoing” was how the paper was phrasing it, and they were doing their phrasing in a three-inch banner below which were printed photos of the accident scene, photos of the solicitor at the press conference where she’d made this announcement, and a publicity shot of Hiro Matsumoto and his cello, as if he and not his brother were the victim of the accident in question.

Now that Scotland Yard had admitted its part in causing the terrible injuries from which Yukio Matsumoto was heroically trying to recover, Mrs. Bourne had said, she would be exploring the monetary compensation owed to him. They could all thank God that no armed officers had been involved in chasing the poor man, by the way. Had the police been wielding guns, she had little doubt that Mr. Matsumoto would now be awaiting burial.

Isabelle reckoned that the real reason she was sitting in Hillier’s office with the assistant commissioner and Stephenson Deacon had to do with the monetary compensation that Zaynab Bourne had mentioned. Feverishly, she went back over her conversation with the solicitor-held in the corridor outside of Yukio Matsumoto’s room-and she recognised an element of that conversation that Bourne had not taken into account prior to speaking to the press.

She said, “Mrs. Bourne is exaggerating, sir.” She spoke to Hillier. “We had a conversation about what led up to Mr. Matsumoto’s injuries, but that was the extent of it. I no more agreed to her assessment of the circumstances than I offered to slash my wrists in front of television cameras.” She winced inwardly as soon as she’d spoken. Bad choice of visual image, she thought. From the expression on the assistant commissioner’s face, she reckoned that he would have been only too happy had she slashed her wrists or any other part of her body, for that matter. She said, “The two of us talked alone as well,” and she hoped they’d fill in the blanks from there so that she would not have to do so: There were no witnesses to their conversation. It mattered little what Zaynab Bourne said. The Met could simply deny it.

Hillier looked at Deacon. Deacon raised an eyebrow. Deacon looked at Isabelle. Isabelle went on.

“Beyond that,” she said, “there’s the not inconsiderable matter of public safety to be looked at.”

“Explain.” Hillier was the one to speak. He glanced at the phone messages fanned out on the table. Isabelle assumed they were from Bourne, the media, and Hillier’s own superior officer.

“There were hundreds of people in Covent Garden when Mr. Matsumoto bolted,” Isabelle said. “It’s true we gave chase and Mrs. Bourne can certainly argue that we did so despite knowing the man is a paranoid schizophrenic. But we can counter that claim with the weightier claim that we gave chase for precisely that reason. We knew he was unstable, but we also knew he was involved in a murder. His own brother had identified him from the e-fit in the newspapers. Beyond that, we had hairs on the body that we knew were Oriental in origin and that, in conjunction with a description of this very man running from the scene of a violent murder, clothing disheveled…” She let the remainder of the sentence dangle for a moment. It seemed to her that the rest was implicit: What option had the police possessed other than to give chase? “We had no idea if he was armed,” she concluded. “He might very well have struck again.”