Stanley glanced over at Sophie. ‘You all right, Princess?’

She was trying to tidy her hair, which had become dishevelled after all her running around. ‘I’m fine.’

‘Okay, get in the car. I’ll sort this lot out.’

Sophie clambered into the passenger seat while Stanley grabbed Nick by the scruff of the neck and dragged him towards the other two boys, both of whom were stiff with fear.

Stanley’s breathing was heavy and laboured, like a bull winding up ready for the charge. He stared at each of the boys in turn, moving his face so close that they could smell the mixture of stale coffee and tobacco on his breath. ‘If any one of you three even so much as looks at Sophie again, I’ll make sure that the very last fucking thing you see on this earth is my face. Do you understand?’

The three boys nodded meekly.

Minutes later Stanley and Sophie were driving through South London, safely hidden behind his tinted windows, grinning like a pair of Cheshire cats.

‘The look on Nick’s face. Honestly,’ giggled Sophie. ‘I thought he was going to wet himself.’

‘Yeah. I get that a lot. So, how long have we got?’

‘A good few hours. Mum thinks I’m heading to a friend’s house so that we can do our homework together.’

‘You know you are going to have to do your homework.’

‘What? You’re kidding me.’

‘If this is going to work, you can’t fall behind with your schoolwork.’

‘Anyway, I’ve already done my homework.’

‘Well, then, you won’t mind me checking it.’

‘You know much about simultaneous equations?’

Jack’s face quivered slightly. ‘I … er … so, you thought that kid was going to wet himself, eh?’

‘Pathetic.’

Sophie rolled her eyes before leaning forward and plugging her iPod into the car’s stereo system. For the rest of the journey the pair sang along to their favourite songs.

Sophie was so absorbed in the music that she hardly noticed the roundabout route Jack was taking or the numerous precautions he employed to ensure they were not being followed. He did it as a matter of course, whether his sources said he was being watched or not. Better safe than sorry was a philosophy that had served him well over the years and he saw no reason to change it now.

But even if Sophie had noticed she wouldn’t have cared much. For the first time in her life, she felt complete. She was smiling inside and out. She had finally found exactly what had been missing during all the years with no father in her life. Someone to champion her, someone to look after her, someone to fight her corner. Someone with big strong arms that she could snuggle up in. Someone who made her feel completely and utterly safe and protected.

The door to DCI Anderson’s office swung open and the senior officer leaned out and scanned the incident room. ‘Hill,’ he barked, ‘can I borrow you for a mo?’

DI Hill put down the pile of papers he was sorting and wove his way through the maze of desks and filing cabinets. By the time he pushed open the door of the office, Anderson was back behind his desk, hovering over a handful of photographs.

‘I want you to go back and see Miller’s widow,’ he said without looking up. ‘I know it’s a rough time but we need to ask her a bunch of follow-up questions. I’ve managed to get hold of a few pictures of Chadwick, his car and some of the places he used to hang about. I want to see if she recognizes anything. It’s a bit of a long shot, but we need to know for sure whether there’s any connection between our victims. I’m sure you treated her with every sympathy the first time around, so she’ll feel comfortable talking to you again.’

Hill nodded. ‘No problem. But I can’t do it until the morning – I’m seeing Miller’s mother and sister in an hour or so … unless you want me to cancel.’

Anderson frowned momentarily. ‘That’s what I get for not checking the action logs. No, stick with your plan. I’ll get copies of the snaps for you to show the relatives and put someone else on this job.’

Anderson followed Hill to the door of his office. He looked around the incident room until his eyes fixed on a dark-haired woman with a bored expression on her face as she tapped entries into her computer.

‘Collins! Come into my office when you have a minute.’

*

Sandra Miller lived in a small three-storeyed terraced house that was on the edge of a trendy new development in Thamesmead. She opened the door and led the way into the compact ground-floor kitchen. Collins sat down at a breakfast table in the far corner and watched while the widow made tea for them both. Miller looked thoroughly exhausted and seemed to be moving in slow motion.

‘Thanks for seeing me at such short notice,’ Collins began when Miller finally joined her at the table. ‘I don’t think I’ll need to take up much of your time. I can only imagine what you are going through right now, and I don’t want to make things any more difficult for you than they already are.’

Miller smiled weakly. ‘It’s so weird. I just don’t know how to feel. We were together for fourteen years. Those first couple of years, I used to say I was full of sunshine whenever I was with him. He was the love of my life back then. But those feelings never last, do they? People change. You end up wanting different things.’

She paused for a moment, lost in her thoughts, before continuing. ‘When he went missing, I guess I always knew it was possible that he had died. I thought I had accepted that I’d never see him again. But now that I know he’s dead for sure, it’s come like a bolt out of the blue. I’m all over the place.’

Miller eyed Collins carefully while taking a noisy slurp of her tea. ‘Am I a suspect?’

The question took Collins by surprise. ‘Do you think you should be?’

‘They questioned me when he went missing, of course. And then that whole business with Leroy. I thought maybe you’d found something that implicated me.’

Somewhere deep inside, Collins’s senses were tingling. It was screamingly obvious that Sandra Miller was not being treated as a suspect and that this meeting was entirely informal. They were talking in her kitchen, not at a police station, she was not under caution, and Collins had come without any back-up. There was only one reason that Miller would have asked a question like that: she had something to hide. And from that moment on Stacey Collins was absolutely determined to find out exactly what it was.

‘So far as we can tell, you were the last person to see Edward alive, so that means you’re vital to the inquiry. The reason I’m here is to find out if you can recall something that might help us when it comes to tracking down your husband’s killer.’

Collins spent the next ten minutes employing the softly, softly approach, trying to ease her way into the more sensitive questions by starting out with innocuous ones: how Sandra and her late husband had met, where they had worked, what hobbies they had and so on. Only once she felt sure her subject was sufficiently relaxed did she show her the photographs given to her by DCI Anderson.

‘Do you recognize this man?’

Sandra took the picture and held it directly in front of her. It showed Raymond Chadwick wearing a dinner jacket and bow tie, holding up a glass of champagne and toasting the photographer. It had clearly been taken at some kind of upmarket social function.

‘No. I’ve never seen him before.’

‘There’s another picture here,’ said Collins, ‘a little more formal. It’s from his last passport.’

Miller took the second print. This one showed Chadwick stony-faced staring directly at the camera. It looked a little like a police mugshot.

‘I really don’t think I’ve ever seen him before. Should I have?’

‘I need you to think very hard about it. It could be important.’

‘Do you think he killed Edward?’

‘Actually,’ said Collins, ‘he’s another one of the victims. His body was found along with that of your husband.’