I heard her sigh.

‘You buy the story that Keith Li was a concerned citizen who happened to be passing by?’

I told my boss exactly what I had told the head of the Wo Shing Wo.

‘Keith Li was there because it’s his patch,’ I said. ‘Somebody clocked the lorry, knew something was badly wrong and called the law. And for a lot of people in Chinatown, the Triads are the law and not the Met.’

‘And what did he tell you?’

‘That his community takes care of their own.’ I watched Barry Warboys bend to pick something up from the smoking debris. It was a woman’s high-heeled shoe, the kind with the red soles. Christian Louboutin. My ex-wife loved those. Barry Warboys looked at it with something approaching wonder. He hung his head and began to sob silently.

‘So we should chalk him up as another totally innocent criminal who happened to be passing by,’ Whitestone said. ‘Just like your friend, the Filipina madam with her social introduction agency.’

‘We can give Keith Li a tug if you want,’ I said. ‘But I think it’s a dead lead.’

‘Just keep one eye on the smooth little bastard,’ Whitestone said, hanging up.

I got out of the car and the cops in the squad car and the chauffeur all watched me walk towards Barry Warboys. I thought the driver might make some token gesture of putting himself between me and his boss, if only to save face, but he wasn’t that kind of chauffeur.

So he simply stood there by the open door, looking like a driver from some black-and-white film about the gilded rich a hundred years ago. He was even wearing gloves.

‘Mr Warboys?’ I said, holding out my warrant card. ‘DC Wolfe of West End Central.’

He wiped his eyes with the back of his hands. I could see his father in him but Barry Warboys was a milder, meeker version, with none of the teak-hard leanness of his old man. He looked like what he was – a prosperous businessman made soft by the good life. He dropped the shoe and politely shook my hand, a strong, firm handshake that did not attempt to crush my fingers, the handshake of a man who had made his life in business.

‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ I said. I hesitated for a moment and added, ‘I can’t imagine what it must be like to lose a child.’

He nodded in acknowledgement.

‘Stephen was hardly a child,’ he said. ‘But of course they never stop being your children.’

His accent had none of the Cockney diaspora vowels of his father and son. Barry Warboys had an accent shaped not by class or city or region but by money and education – an accent posh enough to read the news but not so upper class that it would grate on anyone’s nerves. He was what my grandmother would have called well-spoken.