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everything had changed, had turned to shit, he'd been sitting there with people who were waving warrant cards at him . . .
    Over the weeks he'd covered most of west London. He'd spent long nights walking up to Shepherd's Bush and then along the Uxbridge Road through Acton and Ealing. He'd gone south, around Gunnersbury Park, then turned towards Chiswick, watching the cars rush both ways above him along the M4. He'd walked back towards Hammersmith, zigzagging through the smaller streets and coming out just shy of the bridge, where the river bowed, a mile or two from where the flat lay in the shadow of the flyover; a hospital on one side of it, a cemetery on the other.
    The teenagers at the end of the street paid him no real attention. Maybe there was a look about him.
    There certainly had been at one time.
    He'd got used to it now, doing this instead of sleeping. He enjoyed it. The walking helped him think things through, and though there were plenty of times in the day when he felt completely wiped out, it was like his body was adjusting; compensating, or whatever the word was. He remembered reading somewhere that Napoleon and Churchill and Margaret Thatcher had all made do with a couple of hours' kip each night. It was obviously all about how you approached things when you were awake. Maybe you could get away with it, as long as you had a purpose.
    He turned for home. Headed down Goldhawk Road towards Stamford Brook Tube station.
    He'd write to her again when he got back.
    He'd make a coffee and turn on the radio, then he'd sit down at the crappy little table in the corner and bang out another letter. Tell her how everything was going. Two, maybe three pages if it came easy, and when he'd finished he'd put it with the others; wrapped up in elastic bands, in the drawer that he'd stuffed full of handsets and SIM cards.
    Then he'd take out another phone, and sit there, and wait for the sun to come up.

FOUR
    Dawson might have been a sanctimonious little shit, but there was no faulting him and his colleagues when it came to speed. Before the morning's first cup of coffee had gone cold, Thorne was sitting at a computer in the Incident Room, looking at a high-resolution JPEG of the photograph that had been sent to his phone.
    It was carpet beneath the dead man's head.
    'He'll never get that mess out of the shag-pile,' Stone had said, waving around his own hard copy of the picture. 'I don't think there's a Stain Devil for blood, is there?'
    Kitson took the photo from him, looked at it for a few seconds, then laid it down. 'Stain Devil number four. But if it's this poor bastard's carpet, I really don't think he's going to give a toss . . .'
    Thorne was using one hand to move the cursor across the image, tracing a line around the ragged patch of red, while the other pressed a phone to his ear. He'd emailed the picture straight across to St George's Hospital, where Phil Hendricks supplemented the pittance the Met paid him by teaching three days a week.
    Hendricks had called him straight back. 'It's still just a picture,' he said.
    Thorne waited a few seconds. 'Well?'
    'I'm not exactly sure what it is you want.'
    'An opinion, maybe. Expertise . I'm probably wasting my time . . .'
    'It might be a high-resolution image, but the photo itself is still pretty low quality. Not enough megapixels, mate.'
    'You sound like that kid in the phone shop.'
    Hendricks was right, though. The image remained undefined, and even the magic worked by the boffins at Newlands Park had yielded little in the way of useful information: the body lay on a carpet; the hair was perhaps greyer than it had first appeared; what had looked on the phone's tiny screen like a patch of shadow at the neck was probably the edge of a tattoo, poking from below the line of the dead man's collar.
    'So nothing that's going to help me, then?' Thorne asked, letting the cursor rest on the single visible eye. 'Blood not giving you any clues? Bullet wound, blunt instrument,