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to find myself drenched in sweat and hardly able to breathe. I scrabbled backwards until I hit the shed door and found myself, wide awake, in the garden.
    Awake or not, it seemed the dream was hovering around. I could see pale-blue eyes, the dead woman’s eyes, staring into mine with
something like rage. No, that wasn’t right, the eyes had been terrified. Except now the terror was mine. And the eyes were getting closer all the time …
    The chill night air was taking away some of the heat. I was OK, it was just delayed shock. Just a dream, my first for a very long time. I stumbled halfway across the garden and stopped.
    Music was coming from close by, possibly the park. But it wasn’t the sort of pounding, pulsing sound I was used to hearing here at night. This was a melody, soft and light, drifting across the rooftops. Julie Andrews from The Sound of Music , the song she sings to comfort the children scared of the storm. Raindrops and roses , it begins. ‘My Favourite Things’.
    As a child, I’d been enchanted by The Sound of Music . I’d loved this particular song and played the game myself, making lists of my favourite things. When life got completely shit (regular occurrence when I was a kid) I’d played the game and made myself feel a little bit better. But it had all been so long ago.
    I took a step closer to the house.
    The music was still playing, softly, sweetly, and beneath it, on the other side of the garden wall, I could hear scuffling. Quickly, I checked the side door that led to the alley. The bolt was shut. Something moved again, something brushing against the wall. I wouldn’t normally describe myself as a timid person but I felt a sudden need to get indoors.
    I hurried across the garden and in through the conservatory, checking the locks more carefully than I normally do. Probably just one of those weird coincidences, and yet, as I pulled a spare blanket from the cupboard and curled up on the sofa, I couldn’t help wondering why it should be tonight, of all nights, that someone should decide to play ‘My Favourite Things’.
    Â 
    I woke to the sound of my phone ringing. It was the duty sergeant at Southwark. I’d left instructions that if a certain person called for me, I was to be found. That person was now waiting at the station. So, day off or not, I was going into work.

9
    Saturday 1 September
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    â€˜T HEY WAS THREE OF THEM. AT FIRST THEY WAS THREE OF them. Then more arrive.’
    I sat very still on the wooden bench, not wanting to do anything that might distract her. I really wanted to make notes, but she’d refused to let me. She hadn’t allowed me to turn on the tiny recorder I’d brought with me either. She wasn’t making a statement, she’d said repeatedly, until she was certain I understood. She wasn’t even prepared to stay in the station. So we’d gone out, had walked down towards the river, to the place where Shakespeare’s Globe had been re-created on the South Bank.
    Rona Dawson was fifteen years old, plump, with gleaming skin and braided hair. Eyes like dark chocolate. She was a good-looking black girl like dozens of others from south London. And like dozens of others, she’d been raped by her boyfriend and several of his mates.
    Rape crime, particularly rape by gangs of young men and boys, has become a huge problem in south London. Not too long ago, Scotland Yard statistics showed a trebling in the incidence of gang attacks across the city over the past four years. More than a third of the reported victims were under sixteen.
    When it comes to rape, of course, reported incidents are the tip of the iceberg.

    â€˜When you arrived at the flat, there was just the three of them?’ I asked, when she didn’t go on. ‘One of them was Miles?’
    She nodded.
    â€˜And Miles had phoned to ask you to come round?’
    She nodded again. ‘He say come round and watch a DVD. I thought