They had gone to a house to recover a drug debt, not realising that the man they wanted had moved on weeks before, and the new tenant was too drunk to explain their mistake before they beat him to death. They had taken a life, and would certainly be found guilty, but any satisfaction was dulled by Kathy’s calculation, made while waiting on the corridor benches day after day, that all the time the police, the lawyers, the gaolers, the administrators, the forensic staff, the court officials, the jury and the witnesses had spent in achieving this would amount to another human lifetime, a good part of it her own. All for one utterly stupid mistake. This was not what she’d been made up to inspector for. She badly wanted a case that would allow her to flex her newly promoted investigative muscle, a case that would, well, mean something.

As she reached the main doors she felt her phone buzz in her pocket. It was Brock, sounding rushed. ‘Kathy, still tied up?’

A crisis was gripping Queen Anne’s Gate along with the rest of Homicide and Serious Crime Command, with the terrorist alert level newly raised to ‘severe specific’ at a time when an epidemic of spring flu had cut through the ranks. It had made her own inactivity all the more galling.

‘Just finished, hopefully for good. I’m leaving now.’

‘I’ve had a call from Sundeep, steamed up about something. Couldn’t get much out of him, except that it’s about an autopsy he’s doing. He said it was urgent. I’d go myself, but I’m due at a meeting in Broadway in ten minutes. Could you look after him?’

‘Sure.’

‘Good. I’ll get Pip to come and pick you up, shall I?’