Farnham was silent. He had decided that PC Vetter probably also believed in palmistry and phrenology and the Rosicrucians.

‘Read the back file,’ Vetter said, getting up. There was a crackling sound as he put his hands in the small of his back and stretched. ‘I’m going out to get some fresh air.’ He strolled out. Farnham looked after him with a mixture of amusement and resentment. Vetter was dotty, all right. He was also a bloody fag-mooch. Fags didn’t come cheap in this brave new world of the welfare state. He picked up Vetter’s notebook and began leafing through the girl’s story again.

And, yes, he would go through the back file.

He would do it for laughs.

The girl – or young woman, if you wanted to be politically correct (and all Americans did these days, it seemed) – had burst into the station at quarter past ten the previous evening, her hair in damp strings around her face, her eyes bulging. She was dragging her purse by the strap. ‘Lonnie,’ she said. ‘Please, you’ve got to find Lonnie.’

‘Well, we’ll do our best, won’t we?’ Vetter said. ‘But you’ve got to tell us who Lonnie is.’ ‘He’s dead,’ the young woman said. ‘I know he is.’ She began to cry. Then she began to laugh – to cackle, really. She dropped her purse in front of her. She was hysterical.

The station was fairly deserted at that hour on a weeknight. Sergeant Raymond was listening to a Pakistani woman tell, with almost unearthly calm, how her purse had been nicked on Hillfield Avenue by a yob with a lot of football tattoos and a great coxcomb of blue hair. Vetter saw Farnham come in from the anteroom, where he had been taking down old posters (HAVE YOU ROOM IN YOUR HEART FOR AN UNWANTED CHILD?) and putting up new ones (SIX RULES FOR SAFE NIGHT-CYCLING).