Harkness passed the cigarettes across and changed the ten-shilling note that Dwyer gave him. ‘Lucky if I make petrol money.’

‘I’m not surprised. You won’t get many people out on a night like this.’

Harkness nodded. ‘It wouldn’t be so bad if I still had the Toms, but they’re all working from their flats at the moment with some muscle minding the door if they’ve got any sense. All frightened off by this Rainlover geezer.’

Dwyer lit a cigarette and cupped it inside his left hand. ‘He doesn’t worry you?’

Harkness shrugged. ‘He isn’t after the likes of me, that’s for certain, though how any woman in her right mind can go out at the moment on a night when it’s raining beats me.’ He picked up the evening paper. ‘Look at this poor bitch he got in the park last night. Peggy Nolan. She’s been on the game round here for years. Nice little Irish woman. Fifty if she was a day. Never harmed anyone in her life.’ He put the paper down angrily. ‘What about you blokes, anyway? When are you going to do something?’

The voice of the public, worried, frightened and looking for a. scapegoat. Dwyer nipped his cigarette and slipped it back into the packet. ‘We’ll get him, Sam. He’ll over-reach himself. These nut-cases always do.’

Which didn’t sound very convincing even to himself and Harkness laughed harshly. ‘And how many more women are going to die before that happens, tell me that?’

His words echoed back to him flatly on the night air as Dwyer moved away into the night. Harkness watched him go, listening to the footsteps fade and there was only the silence and beyond the pool of light, the darkness seemed to move in towards him. He swallowed hard, fighting back the fear that rose inside, switched on the radio and lit a cigarette.

Joe Dwyer moved through the night at a measured pace, the only sound the echo of his own step between the tall Victorian terraces that pressed in on either side. Occasionally he paused to flash his lamp into a doorway and once he checked the side door of a house which was by day the offices of a grocery wholesaler.

These things he did efficiently because he was a good policeman, but more as a reflex action than anything else. He was cold and the rain trickled down his neck, soaking into his shirt, and he still had seven hours to go, but he was also feeling rather depressed, mainly because of Harkness. The man was frightened, of course, but who wasn’t? The trouble was that people saw too much television. They were conditioned to expect their murders to be neatly solved in fifty-two minutes plus advertising time.