DI John Stewart was another matter. He was a nervy man if his bitten fingernails were anything to go by, and his focus on her breasts seemed to indicate a form of misogyny that she particularly detested. But she could handle him. He called her ma’am. She said guv would do. He let a marked moment pass before he made the switch. She said, I don’t plan to have difficulty with you, John. Do you plan to have difficulty with me? He said, No, not at all, guv. But she knew he didn’t mean it.

She met DS Winston Nkata next. He was a curiosity to her. Very tall, very black, scarred on the face from an adolescent street fight, he was all West Indies via South London. Tough exterior but something about the eyes suggested that inside the man a soft heart waited to be touched. She didn’t ask him his age, but she put him somewhere in his late twenties. He was one of two children who were yin and yang: His older brother was in prison for murder. This fact would, she decided, make the DS a motivated cop with something to prove. She liked that.

This was not the case for DS Barbara Havers, the last of the team. Havers slouched into the office-there could, Isabelle decided, be absolutely no other word for how the woman presented herself-reeking of cigarette smoke and carrying a chip on her shoulder the size of a steamer trunk. Isabelle knew that Havers had been DI Lynley’s partner for several years preceding the death of Lynley’s wife. She’d met the sergeant before, and she wondered if Havers remembered.

She did. “The Fleming murder,” were Havers’s first words to her when they were alone. “Out in Kent. You did the arson investigation on it.”

“Good memory, Sergeant,” Isabelle said to her. “May I ask what happened to your teeth? I don’t recall them like this.”