‘Car, now,’ she instructed, keeping Chris close behind as they struck out for the Alfa. She held her breath for the final few yards, cringing as the alarm beeped twice when she unlocked it with the remote.

They got in. Hawkins’ gaze slid from the view ahead to her mirrors as the engine fired, and she began reversing steadily up the inclined track, gratefully watching the scenery shrink as the distance increased.

They both jumped when something clunked against the car roof, ducking in their seats before Hawkins saw the small branch slide down the windscreen, obviously having been dislodged from one of the overhanging trees.

Chris heaved an audible sigh as they reached the relative safety of the public road, and Hawkins pointed them back towards civilization.

She scanned the landscape around them as they cleared the thicker trees, but daylight had gone. She pictured their attacker crossing the darkened fields, ruing his missed shots. Her mind alighted quickly on the three corpses now occupying chillers at Westminster Morgue.

Whatever his motivation, this person had openly attacked two people who identified themselves as police officers. If the three dead men had come into contact with this same individual, somehow triggered the same incentive for unprovoked attack, it begged the question …

Had they just met the killer?

25

They found Frank and Aaron in the Dog and Dragon.

‘There they are,’ Hawkins observed, first through the door, pointing towards the two middle-aged men nursing pints in the back room.

She set off, weaving her way among the dark wooden tables with Chris and Amala in tow. Hawkins had called Amala on the way back from Hertfordshire and asked the sergeant to assemble the team, her intention to chair an end-of-day debrief, so that she and Chris wouldn’t have to explain the afternoon’s extensive developments multiple times.

As expected, Amala had answered her phone within two rings. She was at Becke House, alone, but she agreed to locate and recall the others. Yet only Amala had been present when they reached the operations room forty minutes later, having failed to track down her male colleagues in the meantime.

Straight away Hawkins had suggested the pub.

The only boozer within a quarter-mile radius of Becke House, the Dog and Dragon was a regular haunt for just about every Met birthday, leaving do, big case closure; even the most tenuous excuse for gross alcohol consumption seemed to end up here. Detective salaries were probably the only reason the business survived at all, and most likely why it still got away without having updated its décor since the late nineties. If it hadn’t been almost full of punters, the pub could easily have passed for something you’d expect to see at a property auction, going for a song.