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led the way up to the attic. During that day he had become familiar enough, as familiar as he wanted to be, with the cramped space under the slope of the roof. He cased back against a wall, brushing against the peeling paper.
    Below him the stairway protested at the weight of the two that followed him. The local detective thought it understandable that the Secretary of State would have his own man from Protection with him. The bodyguard would have lived long enough in the Secretary of State's pocket to have become a part of the retinue, almost family. He understood that the Secretary of State needed a face to trust. The Secretary of State emerged into the attic, white dust and cobwebs on the collar of his black overcoat. The detective had taken to the furthest corner, he left the centre ground to the Secretary of State and his bodyguard. He had seen them all. The ones on the breadline, and the most powerful in the land. They all came bowed and subdued to witness the place, the stinking corner, where their child had died. Usually the mothers came too. He knew that some would be aggressive, some would be broken, some crippled with shame. Their child, their future, blown away by a hypodermic syringe. The room was pitifully bare, and even more confused than when the police had first been alerted by the ambulance team because his squad had turned the place over and ransacked every inch of it. The mattress had been taken apart. The girl's clothes had been put into a black plastic sack after examination. Her papers were collected into a cellophane bag which would go to his office for further examination.
    The bodyguard stood at the top of the stairway. He gave the sign with his eyes, he told the local man to get on with his talk. The Secretary of State was known to the policeman only through the television in his living room and the photographs in the newspapers that he never seemed to find time to read but which were kept for lighting the fire before he went to work. The Secretary of State was not a pretty sight, looked like a man who had been kicked hard in the testicles an hour before. He could stand, but the colour was gone from his face.
    He'd done well, the local man, he had had the name, alerted the Metropolitan, and now had the parent where the parent wanted to be, and all this before the rat-pack had wind of the excitement. Drily he thought to himself, if nothing else went right on this one then getting the Secretary of State into and out of this crap heap before the photographers pitched up was good going. He took the lead from the bodyguard.
    "Lucy had been living here for several weeks, sir, at least she was here for a month. Only known means of support, the Social Security. Preliminary post mortem indicates that she was a serious victim of addiction - we don't regard users as criminals, sir, we tend to refer to them as victims. Her wrist veins have been used, no good anymore, and her thigh and shin veins have also been used. She had taken to using the smaller veins in her feet as an injection route. I am assuming that you were aware that she was addicted, sir - I mean, it must have been pretty obvious, obvious that is if you were still in touch with your daughter . . . "
    The Secretary of State had his head down, made no response. Just like all the rest of them, feeling it a duty to get some feel of where their child had died. Christ, the room stank.
    " . . . We cannot yet be certain of the cause of death, not in exact terms, that will come later when Pathology have had their full whack, but the first indicators are, sir, that she took a rather pure dose. What she took was just too much for her system. That causes a coma, and then vomiting. Blocked windpipe does the rest - I'm sorry, sir."

    The Secretary of State's voice was a flat monotone. "I've an old chum, medic in London. I talked to him right at the beginning. I said, 'Whose child becomes an addict?' He said,
    'Your kid.' He said, 'No one worries when the addict