And now, thanks in large part to Tina, they’d finally got him.

She took a long drag on her cigarette and stubbed it underfoot, ignoring the sour expression on the face of a middle-aged woman among the throng of onlookers now gathering at the edge of the cordon that had been set up around Andrew Kent’s building. It was dusk now and Kent himself had already been taken away to Holborn police station to have a DNA swab taken, await questioning, and, of course, get any medical treatment he needed as a result of Tina’s enthusiastic arrest technique.

In the meantime, the team needed to search his flat for any evidence linking him to the crimes. They’d managed to get a warrant two days earlier, just as Kent emerged as their chief suspect, but the place was so heavily alarmed that they hadn’t been able to bypass the security without potentially alerting him, even with the expertise they had available. Now, though, they had Kent’s keys, and as Tina put on her plastic coveralls and walked past the assembled police vehicles towards his flat, ignoring the dull ache in her bad foot, she hoped it was going to give up something good. Because they still didn’t have that much linking him with the crimes, other than the fact that he’d been inside all the victims’ properties. This might be too much of a coincidence to explain away, but it was still nowhere near enough to secure a conviction for mass murder.

‘How’s the neck?’ she asked Dan Grier as they ran into each other at the front door of the building.

‘He caught me with a lucky shot,’ he answered, with just the faintest hint of belligerence in his tone, rubbing his throat through the material of the coverall. ‘I wasn’t expecting it.’

‘No, I saw that. Quite a feisty little bugger, wasn’t he?’

‘He definitely had some kind of martial arts expertise. I think we should have researched his background better.’