At 1.05 that afternoon, I was sitting on a bench in Regent's Park smoking yet another cigarette and waiting for my rendezvous. The rain had long since cleared and it was even threatening to be quite a nice day. I'd already attended the briefing session back at the station where Knox had worked hard to instil some enthusiasm and grit into the inquiry, not an easy task as no one felt there was much hope of intercepting the perpetrator quickly. I'd now got Malik on to the task of identifying her, which, if she was a tom, wouldn't take too long.

I liked Malik. He wasn't a bad copper and he was efficient. If you asked him to do something, he did it properly, which doesn't seem to be a common trait with a lot of people these days. And he wasn't idealistic either, even though he'd only been in the Force for five years and was university educated, which is usually a pretty dire combination. So many of the fast-track graduates who go shooting up through the ranks have all these big ideas about trying to understand the psychology and economics of crime. They want to find out what motivates and drives criminals rather than simply doing what they're paid to do, which is catch them.

I looked at my watch again, which is something I do constantly when I'm early for a meeting or the other person's late. In this case, the other person was late, but then Raymond was never the most punctual of people. I was hungry. Apart from the toast I'd forced down myself earlier that morning, I hadn't eaten in close to twenty-four hours and my stomach was beginning to make strange growling noises. I was, I decided, going to have to improve my diet and start eating more regularly. One of the DCs had told me that sushi was very good for you. The Japanese eat it all the time and, according to him, they have the lowest incidence of lung cancer in the industrialized world, even though they're the heaviest smokers. Raw fish, though. It was a high price to pay for a life of rude health.