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Nightingale had refused her offer of a cup of tea but had accepted a glass of water and it sat untouched on the coffee table next to his armchair. ‘What did you say your name was?’ she said. She ran a hand through her hair and tried unsuccessfully to tuck it behind her ears.
    ‘Jack,’ he said. ‘Jack Nightingale.’
    ‘Have they found them? Have they found the animals who killed my Gabe?’
    ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Patterson. Not yet. That’s why I’m here, just to add to the information we have on our files.’ He looked around the cramped flat. It was above an off-licence in Clapham on a busy street. Trucks and buses roared by at regular intervals and each time the windows rattled. There were half a dozen half-drunk cups of tea on the table, several with thick brown scum on the surface, and an open pack of Pampers. The television was on with the sound muted and there was a towelling dressing gown on the floor by the door. Mrs Patterson was wearing a long denim dress, the front of which was spotted with dried milk and spittle. ‘Is there anyone here to help you?’
    ‘My mum pops around but she has to take care of Dad, he had a stroke last year.’
    ‘I’m sorry.’
    She forced a smile. ‘They say bad things come in threes. My dad had his stroke, my sister crashed her car and was in a coma for two weeks – and then Gabe …’ She put her hand up to her face and shuddered, then shook herself and took a deep breath. She looked down at the sleeping baby and bit her lower lip. Nightingale knew what she was thinking, that the baby was all she had left.
    ‘Should I call your mother, ask her to come back?’
    Mrs Patterson shook her head. ‘She’ll be back once she’s checked up on my dad.’ She looked up at him and forced a smile. ‘I’ll be all right, Mr Nightingale. Is it mister? Or sergeant?’
    ‘Call me Jack,’ said Nightingale.
    ‘It comes and goes,’ she said. ‘I go to bed and cry myself to sleep and when I wake up I forget that he’s dead and then it’s worse. There was a woman here from Victim Support who said every day the pain will get a little less but that’s not happening.’
    ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Patterson, I can’t imagine what you’re going through.’
    She looked up from her baby. ‘You know, you’re the first person who’s said that,’ she said. ‘Everyone else says they understand, they know how difficult it is, how they know how I must feel, but they don’t. No one does.’
    Nightingale smiled sympathetically. His time as a police negotiator had taught him that sometimes when you were dealing with a person in crisis it was best to remain silent.
    ‘It’s not just that I miss him, Jack. It’s that I wasn’t there when he died. He must have been so frightened, so scared. They hurt him so much and I know he must have been thinking about me and I wasn’t there to help him.’ She looked up at the ceiling and blinked away tears. ‘Sometimes I can hear him screaming my name and it’s like a knife in my stomach.’
    ‘Mrs Patterson, I’ve seen the post-mortem report and I can tell you with my hand on my heart that Gabe was unconscious when it happened,’ Nightingale said, his voice little more than a whisper. ‘He wouldn’t have known what was happening.’
    She took a deep breath and then nodded slowly. ‘Sometimes I wish I was dead, too,’ she said. She moaned and the sound sent a shudder down Nightingale’s spine. He got up and sat down next to her. He knew he was breaking every rule in the book but he wasn’t a cop any more so he figured the rules no longer applied to him. He put his arm around her and she buried her head in his shoulder and cried, hugging the baby to her chest. She sobbed for several minutes and he felt his shirt grow damp with her tears. He said nothing, knowing that there was nothing he could say that would make her feel better.
    Popular wisdom said that there were five stages of grief when a loved one died: denial, anger, bargaining,