For the second time in a week, he awoke with daylight penetrating the room and the sound of the cleaner’s hoover buzzing in a nearby room. He unpeeled his face from the desk and sat up, rubbing at his scratchy eyes.

The buzzing stopped and was replaced by another sound: shouting. He got up, ignoring the moans of protest from every muscle in his body, and walked out into the corridor. Someone – a woman – was yelling and screaming obscenities, the sound coming from the direction of the front desk.

He decided to check it out, see if they needed any help. When he got there, he found two PCs trying to usher an old woman out of the building, while she continued to yell about ‘babies’ and ‘those kids’.

One of the constables appealed to her to be calm, at which point she threw herself to the floor, just as Bonnie had apparently done in Tesco earlier.

‘They tried to kill my baby,’ she screamed, thumping the ground.

It was time to step in and help.

‘Come on,’ he said, kneeling beside the woman. He looked up at the PC and said, ‘It’s alright, I’ll take over from here.’

‘Are you sure, sir?’

‘Yes, don’t worry.’ He gently coaxed the woman from her prostrate position. ‘We know each other. Don’t we, Martha?’

Chapter 34

Chapter 34
Winkler – Day 6

St John’s was one of the biggest and best secondary schools in Richmond, the kind of school that sent property prices in the surrounding streets soaring as parents who couldn’t quite afford to go private clamoured to get into the catchment area. This was the school that Alice Philips attended along with her boyfriend, who lived in one of the Local Authority houses that the middle-class parents wished could be moved to allow space for more of their little darlings. If those parents knew what Winkler had just watched, they might think about putting their overpriced houses on the market, start looking for a different school.

It was dynamite. After the girl – he assumed it was a girl – calling herself Hattie Styles had sent him the link, he’d watched the video it had led to with a slack jaw, so stunned and amused by what he was watching that his brain forgot to send the signals to his body that porn usually elicited.