Rain drifted across Regent Square in a grey curtain and when Miller braked to a halt, there were only two customers at the coffee stall, all-night taxi drivers eating fried egg sandwiches in the shelter of the canopy. Miller and Brady ran through the rain and Harkness turned from the stove, a frying pan in his hand.

‘Oh, it’s you, Mr Miller. Looking for breakfast?’

‘Not this time, Sam,’ Miller said. ‘Just a little information. You know about last night’s murder in Dob Court?’

‘Don’t I just? Carts around here most of the night. Did all right out of it in tea and wads, I can tell you.’

‘I’ve just been looking at Constable Dwyer’s report on what happened. He says he called here about ten past ten.’

‘That right.’

‘I understand you had a customer who was just leaving – a Mr Bruno Faulkner according to Dwyer.’

Harkness nodded and poured out a couple of teas. ‘Artist. Lives round the corner from here. Regular customer of mine. Turns out at any old time in the a.m. when he’s run out of fags. You know what they’re like, these blokes.’

‘And it was cigarettes he wanted last night was it?’ Brady asked.

‘He bought twenty Crown King-size. As a matter of fact I’m waiting for him to look in again. He left a pair of gloves – lady’s gloves.

He searched under the counter and produced them. They were in imitation black leather, heavily decorated with pieces of white plastic and diamanté, cheap and ostentatious – the sort of thing that was to be found in any one of a dozen boutiques which had sprung up in the town of late to cater for the needs of young people.

‘Rather funny really,’ Harkness said. ‘He pulled them out of his pocket when he was looking for change. I said they were hardly his style. He seemed a bit put out to me. Tried to make out they were his fiancée’s, but that was just a load of cobblers if you ask me. She’s been here with him – his fiancée I mean – Joanna Hartmann. You see her on the telly all the time. Woman like that wouldn’t wear this sort of rubbish.’

Amazing how much people told you without being asked. Miller picked up the gloves. ‘I’ll be seeing Mr Faulkner later this morning, Sam. I’ll drop these in at the same time.’

‘Probably still in bed with the bird they belong to,’ Harkness called. ‘Bloody artists. I should be so lucky.’

‘So Faulkner had Grace Packard’s gloves in his pocket,’ Brady said when they got back to the Mini-Cooper. ’So what? He didn’t deny having her at his flat. He’ll simply say she left the gloves by mistake or something.’