And I shall call you Chief Inspector is what I didn’t say. Thompson was a tall man with a narrow face and an enormous beaklike nose. He had to be tougher than he sounded to get through life with a nose like that.

“Zack,” said Stephanopoulis, “is the SIO on this case.”

“I’m her beard,” he said cheerfully.

Now, I’m not part of the Met’s famous canteen culture. I do not mourn the good old days when coppers were real coppers, not least because that spares me from what would have been almost continuous racist abuse. But even I get nervous when senior officers tell me to call them by their first name—no good can come of that sort of thing.

“Is there anything unusual about this one?” I asked. “I mean more unusual than usual.”

“He’s ex-Job,” said Stephanopoulis. “Detective Chief Inspector Jerry Johnson, retired from the Met in 1979.”

“Is there a connection to Jason Dunlop?”

“There’s a notation in Dunlop’s diary from March,” said DCI Thompson. “Meet J. J. Norwich. His credit card trace shows that he bought a return ticket from Liverpool Street to Norwich on that day. We think Johnson might have been a source for a story that Dunlop was working on.”

“If it’s the same J. J.,” I said.

“You let us worry about that,” said Stephanopoulis. “You’re there to check for signs of black magic.”

To my amazement, we fell in behind a pair of motorcycle outriders and by the time we hit the M11 we were doing over 120 mph.

Chapter 9 - The Forcing House

MY DAD says that being a Londoner has nothing to do with where you’re born. He says that there are people who get off a jumbo jet at Heathrow, go through immigration waving any kind of passport, hop on the tube, and by the time the train’s pulled into Piccadilly Circus they’ve become Londoners. He said there were others, some of whom were born within the sound of the Bow Bells, who spend their whole life dreaming of an escape. When they do go, they almost always head for Norfolk where the skies are big, the land is flat, and the demographics are full of creamy-white goodness. It is, says my dad, the poor man’s alternative to Australia now that South Africa has gone all multicultural.