“Got it, guv,” said Gerry. “I’m to ask the drugs squad if they know anything about Blaydon dealing drugs without mentioning that I’m asking about Blaydon dealing drugs.”

Banks grinned. “I’m sure you’ll find a way, Gerry.”

“Yes, guv. What else is Blaydon into?”

“Bit of everything, it seems,” said Banks. “Your typical all-round equal opportunity criminal. Dodgy property deals, pop-up brothels—”

“Pop-up brothels?” said Gerry. “In Eastvale?”

“Not yet, as far as I know. But stranger things have happened.”

“I can just see your Mrs. Grunwell running one of those,” Annie said.

Banks smiled at the thought. “You may be right at that. There are stranger things than an eighty-five-year-old madam. Perhaps someone can ask her about it when we talk to her again. In the meantime, you’ve all got your tasks to do.”

ZELDA HAD no idea what she would gain from visiting Hawkins’s house—probably nothing—but at least it got her out of the hotel room and gave her something to think about other than her bad dreams and her traumatic past. It was a fine spring day, and hordes of tourists with jackets or sweaters tied around their waists, mixed with the joggers on the wharf, stood with their backs to the river taking selfies with St. Paul’s in the background. Zelda had chosen jeans, a black T-shirt and a tan kidskin jacket to wear for her outing, with her shoulder bag strapped across her chest and her black hair tied in a ponytail.

Across the Thames, sunlight reflected on the windows of the traffic jammed up on Victoria Embankment. Just past the Oxo Tower, she had to weave her way through a rowdy group of Italian schoolchildren, whose teachers didn’t seem to be making much of an attempt to keep them disciplined. At Waterloo Bridge, she climbed the steps between the National Theatre and the BFI and turned left toward Waterloo Underground station, where she took the Northern Line.

Zelda had almost as good a memory for directions as she did for faces. She had only visited Hawkins’s house once before, briefly, over a year ago, for a “department mixer,” but the minute she got off the Tube at Highgate and made her way up the steps to Archway, she knew instinctively to turn left down the main road, then left again into a residential area of semi-detached houses. Some were painted in light pastel colors, but she remembered that Hawkins’s house had kept its basic red-brick facade, with white trim around the bay windows, a porch with two white Doric columns and a postage-stamp lawn behind a low brick wall and trimmed privet hedges. A short flight of steps led up to the front porch. Today, though, it would have stood out on any street. The windows were all gone and the garden was piled with burned sticks of furniture.

The neighbors were lucky, Zelda thought, when she spotted Hawkins’s burned-out house. Though their house appeared to be relatively undamaged, it was also cordoned off, and Zelda imagined the owners had been told to move out until the fire investigators were certain it was safe to return home.