Elder reached for the bottle and refilled his glass. 'She's dead and I want to know why. I want whoever was responsible to be caught. Is that so wrong?'

'No, it's not wrong. Not at all. It's more than that, though, Frank. More than wanting.'

'What do you mean?'

Framlingham smiled. 'Come on, Frank, you've not come all this way for a fair-to-middling lunch and a few questions asked and maybe answered. You might not want to sign back on full-time, but you'd not mind a bite at this. Am I right?'

'I suppose so.'

'Is that a yes?'

'All right. Yes.'

Framlingham steepled his fingers. 'This investigation, Homicide gave it everything. Overtime, technical support staff, everything. Maddy Birch, she was one of ours, after all. Then, when there was no early breakthrough, things were scaled down. You know the way it goes. Normally, by now, some of my lot would be moving in, putting the whole thing under review. Starting from scratch if needs be.'

'And that's not happening?'

Framlingham set down his glass. 'We're having to tread careful, Frank, this one, with Shields in charge.'

'I don't understand.'

'Come on, Frank. A woman officer and black. If we're seen elbowing her aside…'

'That's ridiculous.'

'Politics, Frank, that's what it is. Perception. That's what matters. I doubt she'd play the race card herself, Shields, but there's others who would.' He sighed. 'It's a quagmire, Frank. A bloody mess. On the one hand we're instigating anti-racist policies left, right and centre, practically dragging ethnic minorities off the streets and begging them into uniform, and at the same time, we'll spend half a million pounds to prove some member of the Black Police Association has been fiddling his expenses. It beggars bloody belief.'

Reaching out, he poured the last of the wine.

'We'll get there, Frank. Just a little more patience, that's all.'

Elder sat back in his chair.

Glancing at the bill the waiter had quietly left, Framlingham took out one of his credit cards and dropped it down. 'Go home, Frank, relax. It's nearly Christmas. I'll be in touch.'

15

Karen Shields began her day at five thirty-five with a sore throat, a thick head and a brace of Paracetamol. Just what she needed, going down with some bug the morning she had to explain to her superior why it was that after almost four weeks, not only had no arrests been made, the only serious suspect they'd had had come up pure as the driven snow. She could already see the look on her boss's face as he offered her a Kleenex for her cold and shuffled her aside.

Not only was Maddy's ex-husband Terry no longer a viable suspect, but any link with the Hackney murder now seemed more tenuous than before. A second attack, not fatal, but similar, had been carried out on a woman jogging in parkland no more than two miles away from the first incident, and two men had been arrested for both crimes and were being questioned. No links with Maddy's death had yet come to light.

In the kitchen Karen made coffee in a stove-top pot and slipped bread into the toaster. Everyone who'd been close to Maddy Birch in any way in recent years, from a cousin who lived in Esher to the roofer she'd haphazardly dated over a four-month period, had been interviewed, in some cases twice, and, where necessary, alibis had been checked.

'One thing you'd have to say about her,' Karen's sergeant, Mike Ramsden, had observed. 'She had a taste for blokes who worked with their hands.'

'Liked a bit of rough,' Lee Furness had said, the look on Karen's face, remembering how Maddy had been found, stopping him like a slap.

It nagged at her regardless: the possibility that the killer had been someone with whom Maddy had been involved, someone of whose identity they were still unaware.

She had gone back to Maddy's friend Vanessa, probing for some forgotten reference, some forgotten chance remark; she'd talked to other officers with whom Maddy had shared the occasional confidence and come up blank. Every square inch of where Maddy had lived had been pored over, every name jotted down, every number traced.

Nothing. No one.

Karen spread butter on her toast.

Could there have been someone nevertheless?

Someone who, as Maddy had feared, had taken to following her, watching her, slipping, unseen, into the security of her home.

More information, that was what Karen wanted, and she couldn't see where it might come from. If there had been a laptop, or even an email address, they might have found hits on some site or other that would lay open some secret predilection. Cross-dressing, water sports, rubber – it wasn't beyond the edge of possibility that Furness had been right, Maddy had liked an element of pain, loss of control, a bit of rough…

Outside it was still dark, the cars moving evenly along Essex Road behind dipped headlights. Another half-hour or so before the traffic would start to snarl up, north towards Canonbury, south to the Angel.

The roofer, Kennet, when they brought him in, had been politeness itself, due deference in his manner and calluses on his hands. In all the time he'd been seeing Maddy, he doubted if they'd met more than once or twice a week. 'You know how it is,' he'd said, smiling at Karen open-faced. 'Shift work. Overtime.'

Could she imagine him…? She'd been doing the job long enough to be able to imagine anyone doing anything.

She'd allowed the coffee to bubble for too long and in consequence it tasted slightly burned. Opening the fridge she took out some jam for her second piece of toast. Maybe she should be having porridge these mornings? Shredded Wheat? Start snarfing down vitamins and those seeds she kept reading about. Linseed? Sesame?

If Maddy had been right and she was being stalked, Karen realised it need not have been anyone she knew, but could easily have been someone she had come into contact with accidentally and who had become somehow infatuated. Shit, it could have been anyone. Possible suspects on the Sex Offenders Register were still being checked, but with nothing from Forensics to help narrow the field, chances were slim. The same with information from National Records, the Holmes2 computer. Karen certainly wasn't holding her breath.

Six o'clock and she switched on the radio for the news. Another American soldier ambushed in Iraq, a few more Palestinian children killed. With only six more shopping days to Christmas, retailers were cautiously optimistic of a record year. Karen had bought presents for her immediate family in Jamaica, parcelled them up but not actually taken them to the post. They would arrive late, again. Her first few Christmas cards lay on the shelf beside the stereo, as yet unopened. Last year she had managed to sign and send her own just before New Year.

Come and spend Christmas Day with us, said her brother in West Bromwich, her baby sister in Stockwell. The children would love to see you, wrote her other sister from Southend.

She didn't know if she could take so much turkey, so much screaming, so much apparent happiness. Pouring the last of the coffee, she picked up her cup and went back into the bedroom to finish getting dressed.