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at angles between the warehouse buildings of Shad Thames. The sky was ocean green. A sliver of cloud held a tinge of jade. The weather was darkening, the temperature falling; the wind had changed direction, sweeping down from Norway into the estuary and along the Thames. He reread Monica Greenwood’s letter with a sinking heart, knowing that she was gone, and that he had to let her go.
    In spite of everything, I still love my husband…best not to see each other for a while…don’t want to hurt your feelings…you know how special you will always be to me…my duty is to remain with him.
    He folded the pages with precision and placed them in a drawer. He had known Monica long before she had become the wife of a former murder suspect. She was an artist, stifled by a passionless academic husband, and yet she had returned to him. May’s vanity was dented. The women in his life had provided him with more heartache than any man deserved. His wife, his daughter and now Monica, all gone. Only his granddaughter April had been saved. She was working under his watchful eye at the unit, her agoraphobia held in check for the first time in years. The barriers between the pair had finally fallen, the circumstances surrounding her mother’s tragic death laid bare and forgiven. April was all he had left now. He would let nothing bad ever happen to her.
    John May always felt old at the onset of winter. He was three years younger than his partner—and looked considerably more youthful—but his bones were just as tired. As the days grew shorter he questioned his motives for continuing. Suppose something happened to Bryant, as he knew it eventually would? Arthur veered between untapped reservoirs of strength and fault lines of frailty. How much longer could either of them draw enough stamina to continue fighting for the unit?
    May grew annoyed with himself; self-doubt felt weak, but it expanded with age. The young were confident because they did not know any better. And for once it was he, and not Bryant, who needed a decent investigation in which to become absorbed. It was the best way to reconcile himself to the loss of such a wonderful woman.
    As he shaved and dressed, he became more infuriated about the way in which the PCU was treated. The unit regularly suffered budget cuts and redundancies because it was a specialist investigation agency. As the nation converged on a single set of public services, the experts were being lost to countries that still held their seniors in high regard. He and Bryant were too old and too attached to London to ever consider leaving, and that made them obvious targets. After all this time the job should have got easier. Instead, they were now fighting for everything they had once been able to take for granted.
    Our time must come,
he told himself, although he had to admit that it was getting a little late.
     
    The backlit fascia of the Mornington Crescent all-night taxi office bathed Detective Sergeant Janice Longbright in an unflattering shade of canary yellow. She shoved up the new roller-shutter covering the entrance of the Peculiar Crimes Unit and locked it in place with a strong right arm. The shutter had been added at the insistence of Raymond Land, after a gang of local thugs had rammed the door with a stolen builders’ van. Mornington Crescent, once an area of rough-edged gentility, of brown brick terraces bordered by damp green canals and soot-blackened railway lines, of dirt-grimed walls and windows and battered street signs, was becoming another London no-go zone of drunks and crazies, where keeping a watchful eye was no longer enough to protect you from harm.
    Figures for robbery, burglary, drug offences, fraud and theft were falling across the Western world, but here sexual attacks, acts of terrorism and brutal murders were on the rise. Small crimes could be thwarted by improved technology, but that left something stranger and more menacing on the streets. Bryant and May had insisted on