By the time the woman had finally gone, it was nearly two-thirty in the morning. Outside the Crouch End police station, Tottenham Lane was a small dead river. London was asleep… but London never sleeps deeply, and its dreams are uneasy.

PC Vetter closed his notebook, which he’d almost filled as the American woman’s strange, frenzied story poured out. He looked at the typewriter and the stack of blank forms on the shelf beside it. ‘This one’ll look odd come morning light,’ he said.

PC Farnham was drinking a Coke. He didn’t speak for a long time. ‘She was American, wasn’t she?’ he said finally, as if that might explain most or all of the story she had told. ‘It’ll go in the back file,’ Vetter agreed, and looked round for a cigarette. ‘But I wonder…’

Farnham laughed. ‘You don’t mean you believe any part of it? Go on, sir! Pull the other one!’

‘Didn’t say that, did I? No. But you’re new here.’

Farnham sat a little straighter. He was twenty-seven, and it was hardly his fault that he had been posted here from Muswell Hill to the north, or that Vetter, who was nearly twice his age, had spent his entire uneventful career in the quiet London backwater of Crouch End. ‘Perhaps so, sir,’ lie said, ‘but – with respect, mind – I still think I know a swatch of the old whole cloth when I see one… or hear one.’

‘Give us a fag, mate,’ Vetter said, looking amused. ‘There!

What a good boy you are.’ He lit it with a wooden match from a bright red railway box, shook it out, and tossed the match stub into Farnham’s ashtray. He peered at the lad through a haze of drifting smoke. His own days of laddie good looks were long gone; Vetter’s face was deeply lined and his nose was a map of broken veins. He liked his six of Harp a night, did PC Vetter. ‘You think Crouch End’s a very quiet place, then, do you?’