“I am the bloody Murder Team,” shouted Stephanopoulis from below. Four flights of stairs hadn’t done much to improve her mood and she emerged onto the roof like an overdue tax demand. She glared at Nightingale and then, stepping carefully so as to preserve the scene, walked over to where Tiger-Boy lay sprawled on the flagstones. Blood had pooled under his head, slick and black in the reflected streetlight.

Stephanopoulis looked over at the body and then back at me. “Not another one,” she said wearily. “You want to watch it, son. At the rate you’re going the Department of Professional Standards is going to have your number on speed dial.” She narrowed her eyes at Nightingale. “What’s your opinion, sir?” she asked.

Nightingale indicated the body with his cane. “Clearly shot by person or persons unknown, Sergeant.” He shifted the cane to point across the road. “I’d say the shots were fired from the roof or top floor of that building over there.”

Stephanopoulis didn’t even bother to look. “Any idea who he is?”

“None whatsoever, I’m afraid,” said Nightingale. “But I doubt he has any friends or family.”

Which meant no one to raise a fuss at the inquest, no one to claim the body. Which meant, if I was to guess, that a fairly large percentage of him would end up in Dr. Walid’s freezer.

It took me an hour to get off that roof and once again I had to surrender my top layer of clothes to forensics, who now had, I calculated, more pairs of my shoes than I did. They swabbed Nightingale’s and my hands for gunshot residue and we both went downstairs to separate cars to give preliminary statements. It was three in the morning by the time Stephanopoulis released us on our own recognizance and by that time even Soho was feeling jaded.

Caffrey and the paratroopers had holed up in a side road off Broadwick Street. I’d been right about the Transit van, which was white and fitted with patently false license plates. “We don’t like paying the congestion charge,” Caffrey said when I asked about them. “The van’s kosher though—belongs to the brother-in-law.” Among them, the paras managed to furnish me with a pair of black jeans, a charcoal-gray hoodie with AGRO stenciled across the front, and a pair of generic sneakers so I could get out of the noddy suit forensics had given me. I caught a whiff of gun oil lingering in the fabric of the jeans and I had a strong suspicion that they and the sweatshirt had been in the gun bags to muffle the clank of the rifles.

Nightingale waited patiently in the drizzle while I got dressed. Before I could join him, Caffrey stopped me with his hand on my arm. “We don’t want to be here when it gets light,” he said.