The house, some distance away, was located down a quiet residential street, tucked away just across from the river, where the great steel towers met the Georgian byways of Shoreditch. It had big, flat-fronted windows, with brightly polished panes of ancient glass in freshly painted pale green frames, and neat potted plants of lavender and small orange trees. It was a beautiful house, immaculately restored, and Cormac could only wonder about the amount of money invested in such a project. He’d double-checked the address, but no, it was here all right.

An incredibly beautiful woman answered the door: tanned skin, blond hair tumbling over a pretty, flowing dress. It was a sunny day, and the yellow light pooling into the lane made her appear to glow.

“You’re from the hospital?”

Cormac showed his badge.

“Not the Social?”

The way she said “the Social” sounded odd with her posh accent; it wasn’t, in his experience, the kind of thing women who looked like that and lived in multimillion-pound houses normally said. They normally never met with Social Services at all.

“Just the health worker,” he said, almost adding “ma’am” to it, her tone was so imperious.

She sighed. “I’m sure you feed back to your spy network,” she said.

Cormac wrinkled his brow and tried to imagine what that might be like. “Sorry,” he said. “Is this a bad time?”

She shrugged in bad grace and let him in.

INSIDE THE HOUSE was even more beautiful: architecturally designed, full of light and slick lines. Expensive-looking art books were piled up heavily on the tables; abstract pictures hung on the walls, which Cormac eyed with a newly found interest. It was a haven: it looked like a magazine shoot. Inside the vast light-filled kitchen, which had been extended back over the glorious garden, were folding doors that today were flung open, meaning the indoors and outdoors mingled, and you could hear birds squawking and bees buzzing—the first time, Cormac realized with a start, that he’d heard these things since he’d gotten to London. A tall, incredibly handsome man wearing tortoiseshell glasses and a perfectly ironed linen shirt was making a green juice in a blender. He turned it off and gave the same distant smile to Cormac. The pair of them were so tall and beautiful they could be in an advertisement, or identical twins.

“Right,” said Cormac. “So . . . the patient?”

The woman rolled her eyes. “She’s fine.”

The woman led him upstairs, past more pictures and books, set off with expensive lighting and polished wood shelves and the scent of posh candles. She took him into a second-floor bedroom, a beautiful, hand-painted room full of friezes of flowers and fairies dancing, with a soft pale carpet on the floor and a huge armchair, stuffed full of books and toys, including a large dollhouse propped underneath the window. It was a dream of a room for a little girl.