‘Stay where you are,’ she told me. ‘And talk.’

I talked. No point not doing.

‘This is a friggin’ mess,’ said Anderson, when I’d done. Tulloch showed no sign of disagreeing. Nor could I, in fairness.

‘It’s obvious what we have to do next,’ I said, as Mizon, pink-faced from her encounter with the burly fireman, came back. ‘Surveillance on the park to find the burka woman before they do. And we have to rattle them some more.’

‘And we do that how, exactly?’ asked Tulloch.

‘We have to make them think we have something on them and that I’m the key. They’ll come after me again, and next time, we’ll be ready.’

Tulloch and Anderson looked at each other and shook their heads in disbelief. If they’d practised the move before coming out, it couldn’t have looked more coordinated.

‘The security on this flat is first rate,’ I said. ‘Scotland Yard installed it. So we reactivate the surveillance equipment, and next time they come calling, we have them.’

‘So you’re suggesting you make yourself bait?’ said Anderson. ‘Again?’

I shrugged. ‘Well, I’ve had some experience,’ I said.

Tulloch was shaking her head.

‘Three killers were in my garden tonight,’ I reminded her. ‘Another two at my front door. The footprint will confirm that. It took nearly twenty years to bring Stephen Lawrence’s killers to justice. Do you really want a case like that on your CV?’

Tulloch dropped her head into her hands. ‘Mark will kill me,’ she muttered.

19

I’M NOT A good sleeper at the best of times, and this was hardly one of those. After everyone left I dozed, had a few odd, short dreams, and time after time found myself staring at the ceiling, listening for movement outside. At around half past four in the morning, I heard it. The door to the shed was being pulled shut.

I got up and tugged on clothes and trainers, surprised at how calm I felt, but somehow I didn’t think it was the masked men out there. My first move was into the living room to make sure the letter-box was holding firm. It was. A peek through the curtains told me that no one was at the front door. In the conservatory I held my breath to keep the glass from steaming up. Nothing in the garden that I could see. I had my torch. Before venturing out, I was going to shine it into every dark corner. I also had a very sharp knife, the best impromptu weapon I could find. Then the shed door swung open and there was the woman in black, spinning on the spot in a slow, lazy circle.

I watched for a second or two. She hadn’t switched on the shed light, it was almost impossible to make out what she was doing. Twirling? Dancing? The open shed door seemed hardly to bother her. I risked the torch, sending a long white beam across the garden to focus on the rotating dark figure. Whose feet weren’t touching the ground.

I reached her in seconds, but it took valuable minutes to cut her down. She’d lifted the punchbag off its ceiling hook and tied a length of strong, nylon rope in its place. The other end of the rope was tight around her neck. If she’d had some experience of making nooses, I’d almost certainly have been too late. Her neck would have broken the second her body fell. At it was, she was slowly choking to death, her weight conspiring with the rope to cut off air. When I got the rope off the hook we both fell to the floor. At that stage, I had no idea whether she was alive or not, but the rope was still dangerously tight around her neck. I managed to loosen the knot, and in doing so pulled away her veil. Her eyes flickered open.

I looked the woman in black in the face for the first time, saw the shape of her head, her hair, features that I recognized. As she took a huge, painful gasp and began breathing again, everything became clear. I helped her sit, before closing the shed door and putting on the light. I wrapped the duvet around her, sat down opposite on the mat and gave her time.

I knew now, finally, what had been bothering me about the night Aamir was killed. The crowd had been too quick to conclude that the attack had been racially motivated. The angry crowd of Asian men had arrived too soon. We’d been watching a carefully staged performance. Smoke and mirrors. Looking at the photograph on Aamir’s bedroom wall, taken during a dance performance, I’d almost got there. I’d just been too focused on the white woman at its centre. I’d missed what else it had been telling me.

The face opposite mine was Asian, dark-skinned and fine-featured, every bit as beautiful as I’d expected. The form still gasping for breath was tall, slender and agile; the body of a dancer, who could move gracefully across snow-covered ground and climb like a monkey. Only the hair was different to the picture I’d carried in my head. The gleaming, ink-black hair I’d imagined was no more than an inch long over the entire, perfectly formed head. I couldn’t think why I hadn’t realized sooner. The woman in black was a man.

‘I saw your photograph,’ I said. ‘On Aamir’s bedroom wall. I’m so sorry.’

He started to cry then. Soundlessly, his face buried in his hands, he wept for the man he’d loved, and for his own life, which he’d been on the brink of ending. I watched his shoulders rise and fall for several minutes, then I moved closer and wrapped my arms around him. He wasn’t much wider than a girl, but so strong; able to support his dance partner high above his head. This was the man who’d been Aamir’s proposed companion at the Rambert Dance Company, the man who’d shared the double bed in his stylish flat, the secret the Chowdhury family had been ashamed to share with the police.

There is little tolerance for homosexuality among devout Muslim communities. To many it is an abomination, a crime against God and nature, possibly the worst form of disgrace a man or woman could inflict on their family. Aamir Chowdhury had been a practising homosexual and it had cost him his life.

‘Were you there, the night Aamir was killed?’ I asked. ‘Did you see what happened to him?’

He nodded and tried to speak, but it was a second or two before I could make out anything above the sobs. ‘They tricked us into meeting there,’ he got out at last. ‘I got away. He didn’t.’

It had been this man, the key to it all, whom I’d seen running away that night. ‘So you know who killed him?’ I asked next. He let his head drop and rise again in a simple act of confirmation.

‘Was it the five men we arrested?’

Eyes the colour of oiled chestnuts gleamed back at me. ‘You know who killed Aamir,’ he told me.

I did. I just didn’t want it to be true. At that moment I’d have given anything for Aamir Chowdhury to be the victim of nothing worse than racial hatred. But I knew I’d have to face it some time.

‘His family,’ I said.

20

WE TALKED FOR the rest of the night. His bruised throat was obviously painful but he managed to tell me that his name was Hashim, that he was twenty-four years old and that he and Aamir had known each other for just over a year. They’d talked about moving away from London, finding a place where no one would know them, of marrying. They’d talked about it in the way some of us talk about winning the lottery, in the way I sometimes dream of a future with Joesbury.

It was never going to happen. Although they’d done their best to be discreet, rumours of the relationship had reached Aamir’s family. His parents had tried to persuade him to go back to Pakistan, to marry a girl from their home village, never to see Hashim again. Aamir had refused, and his loyalty to the man he loved had killed him.

‘Was Aamir’s father one of them?’ I asked, remembering the softly spoken man, who’d been so calm, so dignified in his grief.