What is known is this: The kittens in question were not readily available to anyone, being locked inside the window-display cage because of their value. But standing in front of the cage was Tenille Cooper, four years old, who was watching the kittens as her mother made a purchase of dog food some six yards away. Both Reggie and Michael-interviewed independently and in the presence of a parent and a social worker-agree that Ian Barker grabbed little Tenille by the hand and announced, “This is better than a cat, innit,” with the clear intention of walking off with her. In this he was thwarted by the child’s mother, Adrienne, who stopped the boys and, in some outrage, began to question them, to demand why they weren’t at school, and to threaten them with not only the security guard but also with the truant officer and the police. She was, of course, crucial in identifying them later, managing to pick photographs of all three of them from sixty pictures that were presented to her at the police station.

It must be said that had Adrienne Cooper gone for the security guard at once, John Dresser might never have come to the attention of the boys. But her failure-if it can even be called a failure, because how, indeed, was she even to imagine the horrors to follow-is minor compared to the failure of those individuals who later saw a progressively more and more distressed John Dresser in the company of the three boys and yet made no move either to alert the police or to take him from them.

Chapter Two

“YOU’RE UP TO SPEED ABOUT WHAT HAPPENED TO DI Lynley, I take it?” Hillier asked, and Isabelle Ardery considered the man as well as the question before she replied. They were in his office at New Scotland Yard, where banks of windows looked out on the rooftops of Westminster and some of the costliest real estate in the country. Sir David Hillier was standing behind his oceanic desk, looking crisp and clean and remarkably fit for a man his age. He had to be somewhere in his middle sixties, she decided.