TREVOR. ZELDA realized she had never known Hawkins’s first name until now. “Dead?” she repeated. “I can’t believe it. How? What happened?”

Danvers arranged a row of colored paperclips and rubber bands on Hawkins’s blotter. The gesture annoyed Zelda, perhaps as much for its prissiness as for its presumption. To her, it was still Hawkins’s desk. His paperclips. His rubber bands.

“That’s a matter for the coroner to decide,” Danvers said. “What we’re interested in is any information his staff feel might relate to his death.”

“Are you saying he was murdered?”

“Why would you assume that?” Deborah Fletcher butted in from the sidelines.

“Because you said there were suspicious circumstances.”

Deborah shrugged. “That could mean anything.”

Zelda could see her co-workers, pale and worried, at the far end of the office. It had never been a joyous place to work, and she hadn’t really felt that she had got to know any of the others at all well. She hadn’t been fully accepted by them, had always been regarded as some kind of freak, an outsider. But now Zelda felt the beginnings of a strange bond with the people behind the glass. She turned to face Deborah Fletcher. “Perhaps my assumption has something to do with the way you’re questioning me,” she said.

“Been questioned in a murder investigation before, have you?” Danvers asked.

Zelda froze. The department knew quite a lot about her and her past, naturally, but she was sure they didn’t know everything. Not about Darius, surely. “That’s absurd,” she said. “I didn’t think it was an unreasonable question.”

“Well, seeing as you ask,” Danvers went on, “no, we don’t think Mr. Hawkins was murdered. We don’t think anything yet. But I’m sure you understand that, given his position, given the work you all do here, questions have to be asked. So I’ll repeat my question: do you know anything that might relate to his death?”

“How would I know anything about his death? I’ve only just heard about it from you and, quite frankly, I’m a bit upset.”

“I’m sorry we were so abrupt.” Danvers gave Deborah a sharp glance. “It’s been a long day already, and not even noon. Is there anything at all you can tell us? Did you never socialize as a group? It would be perfectly natural.”

“No. At least, I never did. There was a sort of department mixer at his house a while ago, but that’s all.” Zelda gestured toward the partition. “I can’t speak for them because I am only part-time. Very part-time. I only work here for two or three days each month, usually.”

Danvers raised a bushy gray eyebrow. “Yes, that’s clear from your file. A civilian employee. And the rest of your time?”

“Is really nobody’s business but mine.”

“Ms. Melnic,” said Danvers, “believe me, in these matters, everything I want to be my business is my business.”

“In what matters?”

“I think it would be best if you just answered our questions. We already know, for example, that you’re an artist, going by the name of ‘Zelda,’ and that you live in North Yorkshire with another artist called Raymond Cabbot, who is more than forty years your senior. You say you were abducted some years ago and forced into the sex trade. We know you met Mr. Cabbot in London three years ago, then lived with him in an artists’ colony in St. Ives for some time before moving north about a year ago.” Danvers smirked and tapped the folder. “See. It’s all in there. At my fingertips.”