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about the strength but we thought you might be interested.’
    ‘What’s it about?’
    ‘His daughter. He thinks she’s been molested.’
    Faraday was leafing through the paper. A search of the area around the ponds was still going on, but the
News
editorial left it in no doubt that the city’s women deserved a better deal from the police. Three incidents in a row. Three chances to nail the guy. And absolutely nothing to show for it. This was the kind of nonsense that sent the suits at headquarters racing to their PCs. Any minute now Joyce would be bending over his shoulder, reading the first of the e-mails.
    ‘Molested by who?’
    ‘Her lecturer.’
    The DS named a college in the city. The girl was on some kind of media course. The lecturer taught drama and film studies. According to the father, she’d been pressured into sleeping with him. She was a good girl, weak-minded but a good girl. Bloke needed sorting out.
    Faraday at last closed the paper. The college was up in the north of the city, part of Cathy Lamb’s patch.
    ‘So why me?’ he enquired drily. ‘Can’t you lot cope?’
    ‘It’s not that, sir.’
    ‘What is it, then?’
    ‘His address, for a start, and hers. They both live down your way. She’s in some kind of bedsit in Southsea. He’s got a place in Milton.’
    Faraday reached for a pen. The Donald Duck incidents had all occurred around the edges of Langstone Harbour. Milton was half a mile away.
    ‘And?’ he said.
    The DS paused a moment, then laughed.
    ‘This is the father talking,’ he said, ‘but apparently he’s got a thing about dressing up.’

Two
    Monday, 19 June, noon
    Winter stood in a room at the Marriott hotel, staring down at the view. The sun had come out at last, and from the seventh floor the city was laid out at his feet: rows and rows of gleaming yachts in the nearby Port Solent marina, the motorway threading across the wide spaces of the harbour, the big black silhouettes of the cranes in the naval dockyard and a cluster of sentinel tower blocks far away in the haze. Half-close your eyes and it might be somewhere foreign and exotic, an island city ringed with blue. For a view to start your morning, you could certainly do worse.
    ‘Will you be wanting to bring other guys up here? Seal the room off?’
    The manager was a softly spoken Scot and his recent dealings with the Drugs Squad had fuelled many a laugh at the social club bar down at Fratton nick. Only last month, the drugs guys had used the hotel to set up surveillance in expectation of a big cocaine delivery. The wholesalers were coming down from Manchester and trans-shipping in the hotel car park. Teams of three from the Drugs Squad had organised a twenty-four-hour watch – still cameras, video, the lot – but the bad guys hadn’t shown and on the third day, under their noses, some local scrote had turned up with a rusty old Transit and nicked the hotel lawnmower. They’d all watched him do it – back the van up, open the rear doors, wrestle the bloody thing in – yet none of them had even made a note of the Transit’s registration number. Too busy sizing up the big picture, Winter thought bitterly. Too fucking grand to bother with a £1700 slice of volume crime.
    The hotel manager was still waiting for an answer. Winter finally dragged himself away from the view, back to the room. On the manager’s instructions, nothing had been touched.
    ‘Tell me again,’ Winter grunted. ‘The guy booked in and paid?’
    ‘Yesterday afternoon. Cash. No problem there.’
    ‘But you’re worried about this?’
    ‘Aye, and the bathroom, too.’
    Winter looked round. There’d certainly been some kind of disturbance. An armchair had been upended and there were shards of china from a smashed tea service on the carpet by the telly. Next door, in the bathroom, blood had dried on the splashback tiles around the handbasin. Not a vast amount of blood, but more than enough to warrant the maid putting a call through to the