The flats were supposed to be secure, but Michelle had been a copper long enough to know that a talented burglar could get around almost anything. Though it went against every grain of Michelle’s nature not to report the break-in to the police, in the end she decided against it. Mostly, this was because Graham Marshall’s name had been written in her own red lipstick on the dressing-table mirror. The intrusion was meant to frighten her off the case, and the only people who knew she was working on it, apart from the Marshalls themselves, were other police officers, or people connected with them, like Dr. Cooper. True, Michelle’s name had been in the papers once or twice when the bones had first been found, so technically everyone in the entire country could know she was on the case, but she felt the answers lay a lot closer to home.

The question was, “Was she going to be frightened off the case?” The answer was, “No.”

At least there hadn’t been much cleaning up to do. Michelle had, however, dumped the entire contents of her bathroom cabinet and would have to contact her doctor for new prescriptions. She had also dumped the contents of the fridge, which hadn’t been a big job at all. More important, she had found a locksmith in the Yellow Pages and arranged to have a chain and an extra dead-bolt lock put on her door.

As a result of her weekend experience, Michelle felt drained and edgy on Monday morning and found herself looking at everyone in Divisional Headquarters differently, as if they knew something she didn’t, as if they were pointing at her and talking about her. It was a frightening feeling, and every time she caught someone’s eye she looked away. Creeping paranoia, she told herself and tried to shake it off.

First, she had a brief meeting with DC Collins, who told her he was getting nowhere checking the old perv reports. Most of the people the police had interviewed at the time were either dead or in jail, and those who weren’t had nothing new to add. She phoned Dr. Cooper, who still hadn’t located her knife expert, Hilary Wendell, yet, then she went down to the archives to check out the old notebooks and action allocations.

These days, since the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, there were very strict rules regarding police notebooks. You couldn’t leave blank pages, for example. Each page was numbered, and if you missed one by mistake you had to draw a line through it and write “Omitted in error.” Entries had to be preceded by date and time, underlined, and at the end of each day the officer had to draw a continuous line below the final entry. Most of this was to prevent officers from “verballing” suspects—attributing to them words they hadn’t used, confessions they hadn’t made—and to avoid any sort of revisions after the fact. Notes were made on the spot, often quickly, and accuracy was important because the notebooks might need to be used in court.