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time.’
    ‘No way.’
    ‘Why not?’
    ‘We’d have to date, and that means talking to her. Listening to her talk, I should say. I can’t be fucked with it. If I’d done her tonight, we could have met up again. You can always pretend you’re too horny to eat, and then you can just shag. But if you haven’t done the deed you have to start again and make small talk. And I hate small talk.’
    ‘Yes, I imagine there’s nothing worse than getting to know the person you’re about to stick your penis in.’ The sarcasm was, inevitably, lost on Derwent.
    ‘It’s so boring I would rather wank.’ A sidelong look. ‘I mean that.’
    ‘Can we go back to not talking?’ I asked in a small voice.
    ‘If you want.’ Derwent turned up the radio. He’d found the only station in the UK that still played Whitesnake, and it blasted through the car at a volume that vibrated in my bones. I wasn’t all that familiar with the Whitesnake back catalogue, but given the alternative, I was willing to be enlightened.

Chapter 3
    The white gates of Richmond Park loomed out of the darkness and not a second too soon. We had survived the stop–go suburban roads and made it through the dark heart of Kingston’s one-way system but it had tested Derwent’s patience to the point of failure. He was on edge anyway, as he always seemed to be at the start of a case. I recognised it as fear of failure. In Derwent, that fear was sublimated into aggression. Most of his emotions were.
    ‘At last.’ He drove through the gates and stopped. ‘Which way?’
    ‘Left.’ I’d been saving one nugget of information. Now, I judged, was the right time to use it to take the edge off Derwent’s mood. ‘The GPS reference is near a place called Spankers Hill Wood.’
    Derwent’s eyebrows shot up. ‘Is it, indeed?’
    ‘Could I make up something like that?’
    He laughed. ‘Spankers Hill. I wonder how it got that name.’
    ‘And I wonder why Terence Hammond decided to stop nearby.’
    Derwent’s smile faded and he was silent for the next few minutes as I told him which of the winding roads to take, and watched for the small signposts that confirmed we were on the right track. The drive seemed endless and I was nervous, knowing that Derwent would lose his temper if I sent him the wrong way.
    ‘There they are,’ I said, managing not to sound relieved.
    A couple of police cars marked the checkpoint where we showed our ID to a square, red-faced PC in a high-visibility jacket. His breath misted as he directed Derwent to carry on and park on the left. ‘When you stop, don’t try to pull off the road,’ he said. ‘There are posts in the grass to stop people parking along the verge and they’ll do for your car. That’s why we’re leaving the right side of the road free for access.’
    Tail-light reflectors gleamed red in our headlights as Derwent pulled in behind the last car in the line. He was out of the car quickly, leaving me to realise that the verge was too high to let me open the passenger door more than a couple of inches. I was damned if I’d ask him to move the car to let me get out. I climbed across into his seat, glad I was wearing trousers and grateful for long legs that made short work of clambering over the handbrake. Derwent, typically, didn’t comment when I emerged from his side of the car. He was busy scanning the line of vehicles.
    ‘The boss is here already,’ I said. The shiny black bodywork of the Mercedes gleamed a few cars ahead of us.
    ‘He probably didn’t stop. But we’ll have beaten Chris and Tiny Dancer.’ Derwent was looking pleased with himself.
    ‘His name is Dave, and he’s nice.’
    ‘If you say so. I didn’t think you went for the choirboy type.’
    ‘I don’t have to go for his type to think he’s nice. He’s perfectly fine. He just looks young, that’s all.’ I slid my jacket on, shivering. ‘I wonder how far it is to the scene.’
    ‘Come on. You’ll feel better once you see the body. Get