Grace said nothing for some moments, reflecting. Bruno was the son he never knew he had. He had learned, only on her deathbed, that his long-missing wife, Sandy, had left him soon after discovering she was pregnant with this boy. He’d subsequently found out that, in those years after she’d left, she’d led a wayward life, joining first the Scientologists, then another cult in Germany. She got bigamously married to a rich guy, then they separated after just two years. Unbelievably, at some point she’d become a heroin addict, before getting clean and working to help addicts, first in Frankfurt and then Munich.

Grace wasn’t sure at what point it had all gone wrong for her, but from what Sandy had told him, she had drifted into a hedonistic lifestyle while in the company of the persuasive, charismatic cult leader, and she’d found it nearly impossible to pull herself out of it. He’d tried to get Bruno to talk about this time without much success, and he could only guess at what impact this peripatetic life with an unstable, erratic single parent had had on him.

And he was well aware that uprooting Bruno from his roots in Germany and bringing him to England at the age of ten was again disruptive for him. But he’d hoped that introducing him into a stable, loving and welcoming family environment might have helped him settle down. So far, it seemed not. Whatever Sandy – the woman he had once considered his soulmate – had instilled in their son, she’d left him with strange values and a seriously skewed moral compass.

‘I’d be happy to go and speak to Ted Hartwell. Maybe we’ve never explained Bruno’s background fully enough to him. What do you think?’

‘It’s worth a try. I’ll come with you. I’m sure there is good inside Bruno – maybe we just have to dig deeper to mine it out.’

‘I’ve got it in my diary that I’m taking him to school tomorrow, is that right?’

‘Please. I’ve got eight postmortems. I’ve got to be in at 7 a.m.’

‘No probs, I’ll take him and have a chat with him in the car.’

‘Good luck with that.’

He cocked his head. ‘Meaning?’

Cleo gave him a sleepy smile. ‘I do think he responds to you better than he does to me. But . . .’

He kissed her on the forehead, undressed, hanging up his suit and his tie, then went through into the bathroom and dumped his underwear and shirt in the laundry basket. He picked up the tube of toothpaste and, as the electric brush whirred, tried to focus back on the Paternoster case, but it was Bruno at the forefront of his mind.

And it was Bruno that kept him awake for much of the night. When he did lapse into brief sleep, he repeatedly dreamed of the boy and woke each time with a feeling of dread.

31

Tuesday 3 September

‘Success is all about being ahead of the curve.’