‘I’m going to try to get the lift working. Stay with her, Max.’

Edie left the room and I sat on the bed with Rabia Demir. I took her hand and she half-opened her eyes. They were the darkest eyes I had ever seen. In the distance I could hear sirens but they seemed to be coming from another world.

She tried to speak and I took both her hands in mine.

‘No need to talk,’ I said.

But she wanted to talk. There were things she wanted to say. And even in the middle of the Fentanyl fog that was killing her, she was aware that there was not much time.

‘I am not a bad woman.’

‘I know that, Rabia.’

Her mouth moved.

‘You know my name. Not the name they gave me here. My real name.’

‘Because I looked for you. I have been looking for you for a long time.’ I felt my eyes flood with useless tears. ‘I’m sorry I did not find you sooner.’

‘I never wanted this life.’

‘I know.’ I could hear Edie shouting on the telephone in the main room. Then everything was silence. Even the sirens seemed to have given up.

‘What did you want, Rabia?’ I said. ‘Why did you come here?’

‘I am a nurse,’ she said proudly, and then she closed her eyes, and I held her hands long after she had gone.

31

This was the ritual.

The day after we shut down the penthouse, Edie Wren and I drove to a small terraced house in Tottenham where the mother and the fiancée of our colleague TDC Billy Greene were waiting for us.

Mrs Greene and Siobhan had prepared tea and lemon drizzle cake for our arrival. It sat untouched on a coffee table between us as Edie began to talk. The ritual demanded that Edie speak to the bereaved first because she had known the deceased the longest.

‘I knew Billy from Hendon,’ Edie said, the name our people always use for the Peel Centre, the training centre of the Metropolitan Police College. ‘You meet people at Hendon who are not sure if this life is for them. But not Billy. Being a policeman was all he had ever wanted.’

Her eyes drifted from the mother and fiancée to the family photographs on the mantelpiece, settling on the grinning, gawky figure of PC Billy Greene with his arm around his mother on the day he graduated from Hendon.

‘Then we were in uniform at New Scotland Yard,’ she said. ‘And then he followed me to Homicide and Serious Crime Command at West End Central, where we both trained to be detectives.’

Edie paused, lost for words, aware that all this was sounding more like a CV than a eulogy. She wrung her hands, and then stopped and looked at me.

I picked it up.