“DI Cabbot,” he greeted her, glancing over the top of his wire-rimmed glasses. “Please sit down. I’ll be with you in a moment.”

Annie sat. There was something different about him, she thought. Then she realized. Red Ron had shaved off his mustache since she had last seen him. She was surprised to find that he had an upper lip. She always thought men grew mustaches and beards to hide weak jaws and thin lips. He kept his receding silver hair cut short instead of growing one side long and trying to hide a bald center by combing it over the top of the skull, the way some men did. Annie didn’t understand that. What was so wrong with going bald? She thought some bald men were quite sexy. It was one of those ridiculous macho male things, she guessed, like the obsession with penis length. Were all men so bloody insecure? Well, she would never find out because none of them would ever talk about it. Not even Banks, though he did at least try more than most. Perhaps it was something they really couldn’t do, something they were genetically incapable of, something going back to the caves and the hunt.

Annie brought herself back to the present. The ACC had just finished signing a stack of papers and after he had buzzed his secretary to come and take them away, he leaned back in his chair and linked his hands behind his head. “I suppose you know why you’re here?” he began.

“Yes, sir.”

“The chief constable got in touch with me last night—just as I was settling down to my dinner, by the way—and said he’d had a complaint about you from Martin Armitage. Would you care to explain what happened?”

Annie told him. As she spoke, she could tell he was listening intently, and every now and then he made a jotting on the pad in front of him. Nice fountain pen, she noticed. A maroon Waterman. Sometimes he frowned, but he didn’t interrupt her once. When she had finished, he paused for a while, then said, “Why did you decide to follow Mr. Armitage from his house that morning?”

“Because I thought his behavior was suspicious, sir. And I was looking for a missing boy.”

“A boy he had already told you was due back that very day.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You didn’t believe him?”

“I suppose not, sir.”

“Why not?”

Annie went over the Armitages’ behavior on the morning in question, the tension she had felt, the brusqueness of their response to her, the haste with which they wanted rid of her. “All I can say, sir,” she said, “is that I found their behavior to be out of sync with what I’d expect from parents who’d discovered that their son was all right and was coming home.”

“All very speculative on your part, DI Cabbot.”

Annie gripped the arms of the chair hard. “I used my judgment, sir. And I stand by it.”

“Hmm.” Red Ron took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “It’s a bad business,” he said. “We’ve had the press all over us, and needless to say they’re hot to trot with this idea of a simple kidnapping gone wrong. Add police cock-up to that, and they’d like nothing better.”