She was impatient. The call had come half an hour before, cancelling the first scheduled meeting of the new Major Enquiry Team and diverting personnel to Shoreditch, and she felt the anticipation itching inside her at the beginning of a new case. She checked the mirror to make sure the girls were clear of the back of the car and caught her own reflection. Serious eyes, official eyes. This is how you get to look in your thirties when you take your job too seriously, she thought. Her hair, very pale in the gloom of the dark street, fell almost to her eyes, and she remembered that she’d booked for a cut that afternoon. She’d have to cancel.

As she moved on she passed the end of a narrow service lane and saw two uniformed police examining a row of dustbins. Ahead she spotted a pulsing blue light at the point where the street opened into a square. The patrol car was parked outside a sandwich shop, Mahmed’s Cafe, with two cops stooped talking to the driver, leaning against the car roof to ease the weight of their protective vests and loaded belts.

Kathy slowed and called across to them.‘Hi, DS Kolla, SO1. Northcote Square?’

‘This is it.’ The man, registering the initials of the Serious Crime Group unit, peered across at her. ‘Better park down here, Sarge. The north end’s chocker.’

As she rolled forward she saw what he meant, a jam of vehicles blocking the far end of the square. She hadn’t been here before, and she had the impression of a rather forbidding place hidden away among the tangle of streets. The square was surrounded by buildings of mixed age and use, mostly in dark red brick, all severe and square-profiled against the grey sky. Theyoverlookedathicklytreed central garden fenced by iron railings. Kathy pulled up beneath a no stopping sign and placed her Metropolitan Police Emergency notice on the dash. One of the uniforms came over to her.

‘That’s the house,’ he said, pointing to a building at the other end of the square behind the densest crush of vehicles and people. Originally two storeys high and rather squat and plain, a further two floors of milky white glass had been added.‘Press have just arrived.’