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enough,’ said Graham.
    Malik and Rafi turned out to be students at a very bogus-sounding language school in Clerkenwell – and given that Clerkenwell was at the opposite end of the city, Slider would have bet neither of them had ever been anywhere near the address on the letterhead. Judging by the state of their room, cleanliness did not rank anywhere near godliness with them; nor did the number of their heads match the number of mattresses and heaps of cushions and blankets marking out sleeping places on the floor. And judging by the smell in the room and their extreme nervousness, they were in the habit of wiling away the time with recreational tobacco.
    But they seemed to know nothing about the upstairs tenants, and given how much trouble they were already in without getting mixed up in murder, Slider was inclined to believe them. They claimed to have been at a party on Sunday night until the early hours. They had not noticed the music upstairs when they came in, but loud music was probably not something they would take notice of anyway. It was annoying, but he would have to check their alibi before he shrugged them off, which was a waste of manpower and time. He looked forward to passing the whole mess of their dubiously legal presence on to the specialist squad and wishing them well of it.
    Most of Slider’s firm were back and writing up their reports when Detective Sergeant Atherton, Slider’s bagman and friend, strolled in. He had been to an awareness top-up seminar, and returned ready for some plain talking, short words, and if possible an entire absence of concepts.
    Atherton never managed to look quite like a policeman, with his fastidiousness and his beautiful clothes and the fact that he spent more on a haircut than any of the others spent on a shirt. When he had been in uniform there had been something almost surreal about the sight of him in
that
tunic and
that
helmet. He had looked like a very handsome actor playing a policeman in a comedy sketch. He had been so obviously out of place that many of his colleagues simply assumed he must be gay, despite his multiple sexual conquests, because they couldn’t account for him any other way.
    One of the early reasons for Atherton’s devotion to Slider had been that Slider had never, from the first meeting, looked at him askance. Slider had his countryman father’s view that God had made all creatures different for His own purposes. A horse was not a cat and a cat was not a dog, and only a fool would want them to be. Slider had taken Atherton for what he was and worked him that way. And Atherton, who was not any kind of a fool, had not taken long to work out that, in his own way, Slider was just as much of a misfit in the Job: it was just that he didn’t
look
different.
    The first thing Atherton saw as he reached the CID room door was DC McLaren, working his keyboard with one hand and mournfully eating cottage cheese with the other. His new girlfriend was running him ragged: putting him on a diet, making him have his hair ‘styled’ instead of cut, making him buy new clothes. She had even given him a manicure, and khazi gossip had it she was threatening him with a facial. McLaren, newly lean, fragrant and polished, and bewildered by a variety of unfamiliar sensations and unsatisfied hungers, bore with it all because after years of living alone in divorced slobbery, he was hopelessly, grotesquely in
lurve
. But to his colleagues he seemed a shadow of his former self. Atherton almost felt a twinge of sympathy.
    He looked up as Atherton came in. ‘What was it like, then? Was it good?’
    ‘The usual. Policing of the Future. It seems we’ve been doing it all wrong so far,’ Atherton said with delicate irony.
    ‘Not that,’ McLaren said. ‘I meant – there’s a DS I know at Kensington went last week. He said they had these amazing kind of cakes at the coffee break.’
    Atherton toyed for a moment with telling him there had been boxes of mixed Krispy