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a cordon tape held the reporters well back. All the camera operators were able to film was distant footage of a white tent and a man going into it carrying a surgical steel saw.
    Ten minutes later Redlaw reappeared, nodded curtly to a fellow SHADE officer waiting outside the tent, said the bodies were ready now for the morgue, got into his car and drove off into the night.

CHAPTER THREE
     
    Giles Slocock, Conservative Member of Parliament for Chesham and Amersham, awoke in his constituency home with a cocaine hangover and a prostitute snoring next to him in bed. He dealt with the former by means of a quick hair-of-the-dog toot from the stash in his bedside drawer, and the latter by means of a kick in the ribs, a thick wad of cash, and a taxi. He gave the girl a little more than the agreed-upon fee, mostly because she had consented to bum sex (bareback, too, a double bonus) but also to ensure her silence. He had hired her from a reputable escort agency which prided itself both on the exclusivity of its client list and the discretion of its employees, but still, one could never be too careful. Slocock had been burned a couple of times in the past by tattletales flogging their stories to the scandal sheets. His career had survived, but he was aware that the public’s tolerance for misbehaviour from its elected representatives was not infinitely elastic. It stretched only so far before it snapped, with often painful consequences.
    A shower rinsed the smell of the girl’s cloying perfume from Slocock’s body and the smears of shit from beneath his foreskin. Then he dressed and went downstairs to breakfast and the morning papers.
    More interesting than anything to be found in the pages of the print media was an item on BBC Breakfast about trouble the previous night at the Hackney SRA. Slocock, eating the first of three boiled eggs, watched with detached curiosity as a reporter spoke of a bloodlust riot and the deaths of two BovPlas delivery drivers. The twin brother of one of the dead men was interviewed.
    “Derek, he was, like, a decent bloke who did his job,” said Keith Bannerman, fighting back tears. “He knew it was dangerous work, like, but the money was good and he was always a bit of a night owl anyway, so the hours, y’know, suited.”
    “And what are your feelings about his killers?” the reporter asked, somehow managing to flutter her eyelashes even as she put on a concerned and solicitous frown.
    “Scum,” Keith Bannerman spat. “It’s the only word for ’em. Bloodsucking scum. Come over here, make everyone’s lives a misery, we bend over backwards to help them, and this is how they thank us? Send them back home, that’s what I say. I mean, who invited them? Ruddy parasites. Send them back home—if we can’t stake the lot of them, that is...”
     
    Six hours later, Slocock stood up in the House of Commons in his role as Shadow Spokesman for Sunless Affairs and quoted the grief-stricken Keith Bannerman verbatim.
    “‘I mean, who invited them? Ruddy parasites. Send them back home—if we can’t stake the lot of them, that is...’”
    Slocock let the words ring round the chamber, before continuing: “The view, Mister Speaker, of a man who has just lost his brother, his twin brother, in the most tragic and dreadful circumstances imaginable. A man whose closest relative fell prey to a crazed mob and was brutally, viciously attacked and exsanguinated by them. A man struggling to come to terms with the appalling knowledge that the very individuals whom his brother was helping turned on him and subjected him, along with his colleague, to the most cruel and barbaric form of murder that we currently know of. And Keith Bannerman is far from alone in holding the opinions he does. Rather, he speaks for a broad swathe of British citizenry. I put it to you, Mister Speaker, that the right honourable gentleman before me, the Secretary of State for Sunless Affairs, barely comprehends the level of public disquiet