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now there’s something else, probably something benign, and when you put the two together you get the reaction we got. So it’s milk plus X. We just don’t know what X is. It could be anything in the yoghurt I gave her. Flavourings, colourings – the usual stuff. So we’re trying them out. Till we find out, she has to keep off real milk. It’s back to soya and rice substitutes.’
    Her shoulders had sagged and Shaw had guessed she was thinking about the first few months of Fran’s life – the endless vigilance required to make sure a small child didn’t ingest anything containing milk.
    He hugged her too hard. ‘OK.’
    â€˜Handsome,’ she’d said then, nodding back at the picture. ‘Innocent.’
    â€˜Interesting word,’ said Shaw, adding shadow beneath the broad chin. ‘Why innocent?’
    â€˜It’s a presumption – the dead are innocent, aren’t they?’
    They’d chatted for a while over fresh coffees before going to bed. An hour together before the day began. When Shaw had walked back into the café to retrieve the sketches at dawn he’d stopped six feet from them, aware that he’d recreated someone who had once been alive. The face of this man who had died so violently looked at him over the twenty-eight years separating that last terrifying moment from this one.
    â€˜All you need is a name,’ said Shaw out loud. Then he’d held out his hands, as if pleading before a jury, laughing at himself. ‘And justice.’
    And now, sitting in Max Warren’s office, he looked again at the sketch. The adrenaline of the murder inquiry had dispelled all tiredness, despite the lack of sleep, but he did feel that nauseous buzz, his blood rushing with the effects of several doses of strong coffee.
    He handed the frontal view to Valentine, who took it, then held it out at arm’s length.
    â€˜Get it out for me, George. Usual suspects – TV, radio, Lynn News . We’ll give it twenty-four hours and if nothing bites, let’s go for posters – five hundred will do.’
    Valentine pushed his bottom lip forward. ‘Reckon the Old Man will pay up? Posters cost a fortune.’
    In the outer office Max Warren was finishing his dictation.
    â€˜He won’t know until it’s too late,’ said Shaw, flicking over the sketch pad to work on the side view.
    Valentine rubbed his eyes, feeling a gritty resistance. He hadn’t slept after leaving St James’s either. It wasn’t that he hadn’t wanted to – he’d walked into South Lynn by the towpath until he’d reached the ruins of Whitefriars Abbey, then turned into the network of streets in which he’d been born, married and widowed, and where he still lived. The cemetery in which they’d found their victims that night was less than half a mile away. He’d considered returning there, but thought better of it. Instead, he’d walked to the church of All Saints and stood before his wife’s headstone:
    Â 
    JULIE ANNE VALENTINE
    Â 
    1955–1993
    Â 
    Asleep
    Â 
    The stone was mottled with moss and the inscription partly obscured by the charity lapel stickers he’d stuck on it. He added wood green animal shelter, thinking how, like him, she’d hated dogs. It always annoyed him, that cloying euphemism – Asleep. He wondered who’d chosen it, because it hadn’t been him. But then he’d walked through her death, and the funeral, as if it had all been happening to someone else.
    On the corner of Greenland Street he’d stopped outside an old shop. His house was in sight, but he often lost the will to go home at this precise point. The old shop’s double doors were glass and curved gracefully. Within was a second door, with a fanlight, from which shone a green light. And a sign hung from a hook up against the glass. Chinese characters, but ones that Valentine could