‘What happened to the little boy?’

‘He was adopted,’ said Burden. ‘He was quite a long time in hospital and then I heard that Leilie had agreed to have him adopted. Best thing for him.’

Wexford nodded. ‘Strange, though,’ he said. ‘She always seems such a gentle meek creature. I can imagine her not knowing how to cope with a child or being a bit too easy-going or not noticing it was ill, say, but baby-battering – it seems so out of character.’

‘You’re always saying how inconsistent people are. You’re always saying people are peculiar and you never can tell what they’ll do next.’

‘I suppose I am,’ said Wexford.

He sent Loring to keep the Roland Road flat under observation, and then he and Burden went to lunch in the police station canteen. Polly Davies came up to Wexford while he was eating his dessert.

‘I looked in at Bystall Lane, sir, and saw young Ginger. They said, did we think of making other arrangements for him or were they to keep him for a bit?’

‘My God, they haven’t had him twenty-four hours yet.’

‘That’s what I said, sir. Well, I sort of said that. I think they’re short-staffed.’

‘So are we,’ said Wexford. ‘Now then, I don’t suppose anyone saw Karen Bond being put on that doorstep?’

‘I’m afraid not, sir. No one I’ve spoken to, anyway, and no one’s come forward. Mrs Bream who housekeeps for the priest, she says the cardboard box – the Smith’s Crisps box, you know – was there when she came at nine only she didn’t look at it. She thought it was something someone had left for the father and she was going to take it in once she’d got the kitchen cleared up and his bed made. Father Glanville says he went out at ten to nine and he’s positive the box wasn’t there then, so someone must have put it there in those ten minutes. It looks like someone who knows their habits, the father’s and Mrs Bream’s, doesn’t it, sir?’

‘One of his flock, d’you mean?’

‘It could be. Why not?’

‘If you’re right,’ said Wexford dryly, ‘whoever it was is probably confessing it at this moment and Father Glanville will, of course, have to keep her identity locked in his bosom.’

He went off up to his office to await word from Loring. There, sitting at his desk, thinking, he remembered noticing in Susan Rains’s flat, honoured on a little shelf fixed there for the purpose, a plaster statuette of the Virgin with lilies in her arms. The Leightons were perhaps a Catholic family. He was on the point of deciding to go back to Greenhill Court for a further talk with Susan Rains when a phone call from Sergeant Camb announced the arrival of Stephen Pollard.

The stockbroker and his wife had been on holiday in Scotland and had driven all the way back, non-stop, all five hundred and forty miles, starting at six that morning. Wexford had met Pollard once before and remembered him as a choleric person. Now he was tired from the long drive but he still rampaged and shouted with as much misery as Pippa Bond had shown over the loss of her baby. The safe, it appeared, had contained a sapphire and platinum necklace and bracelet, four rings, three cameos and a diamond cross which Pollard said were worth thirty thousand pounds. No, of course no one knew he had a safe in which he kept valuables. Well, he supposed the cleaning woman did and the cleaning woman before her and all of the series of au pair girls, and maybe the builders who had painted the outside of the house, and the firm who had put up the bars.