DC Helen Challice was the second woman to join the Met’s Criminal Investigation Department, the only one based at King’s Cross. It was generally felt that women should not work on crimes of violence and murder, so she was usually set to cases more suitable for the gentler sex. Aaron could imagine Challice had an advantage when it came to interviewing a three-year-old whose father had given her gonorrhea, or a thirteen-year-old who’d been raped by four men in a row and was now pregnant, but he had no idea in what way those cases were supposed to be easier on the investigating officer. She couldn’t be more than twenty-three or so, but after six months in the job, she already looked older.

He’d come across her sobbing in an office one night, and been sufficiently reminded of his own sister that he’d first attempted comforting words, and then just brought her tea that was basically hot sugar syrup until she stopped crying. Once a few days had passed and she’d realised both that he hadn’t made her wobble into station gossip, and that he didn’t intend to make advances off the back of that unexpected intimacy, they’d settled into as close to a friendship as Aaron had at work.

She was a self-possessed young woman, with the brisk confidence of a Head Girl or a hockey captain, and she was looking at Aaron with an air of concern. “Are you not pleased? I’d have thought being compared to Valentino would be quite the boost.”

“I’d rather not be in the papers at all. They will drag things up that don’t matter, and I’d rather just do my job.”

“Valentino, though? I wouldn’t mind it if the papers said I looked like Clara Bow.”

“I bet you would if they said it when they should be talking about a good collar,” Aaron pointed out. “And it’s rather insinuating, isn’t it? The lawyer accuses me of being in the Sabinis’ pocket and then the papers say I look Italian...”

“Do you think that’s it?” Challice gave the Pictorial a quick scrutiny. “There’s nothing in here about the Sabinis at all, though, it’s just their New Faces section.”

“Oh. Well, that’s not so bad.” Aaron was perhaps a little over-sensitive on the subject of his family; skin tended to be thin where it had been previously rubbed raw.

“Really, I think it’s fine,” Challice assured him. “It does say you’re related to man-about-town Paul Napier-Fox, whose recent engagement—”

“I don’t want to know,” Aaron said from the bottom of his heart. “Please stop.”