She’d let herself get cocky and thought she could play the game as well as one of MI5’s best on his home turf. She’d underestimated Knox and been left looking like an idiot. Bennett hadn’t just lost him in Seven Dials, she’d let him toy with her, and prove just how far out of her depth she was.

She wished she had someone to turn to, even just to be put through the wringer for her failure and told what she needed to do to make up for it. But there was no one to debrief her, no one she could vent to or run scenarios with. All she could do was wait for her anger to fade, shove the trilby in a nearby bin, and go home.

Chapter 22

Chapter 22

Knox approached the old tenement building off Deptford High Street. He wanted to take a more thorough look at Bianchi and Moretti’s flat and see what Manning’s investigators might have missed. Unfortunately for him, the policeman standing watch outside didn’t want him to.

Knox tried to step past him, flashing the kind of half-smile that communicated something along the lines of ‘You’ve seen me before and I probably live here,’ but it didn’t work.

‘Where do you think you’re going?’ the officer asked, moving to block Knox’s way.

He was a large, stocky man. His heavy brow, lit from behind by the light from the tenement’s entrance, made it almost impossible to see his eyes.

‘I’m investigating the murder,’ Knox said.

That didn’t work either.

‘Ain’t nothing like that here.’ The officer shifted his weight, squaring up to Knox. ‘Jog on.’

Knox decided it would be easier to play the fool than call up the chief of the Met, who he happened to know personally, and get him to put the fear of God into this jobsworth on his behalf. So he turned on his heel, tripped over his feet for added effect, and headed back to the high street. Then he darted round to the building’s back door, waited for the headlights of a passing car to fade, then gave it a hard, sharp shove, catching it mid-swing before it hit the wall.

There was no guard standing watch outside the flat itself, which, if Knox had really thought about it, made it even stranger that a policeman was guarding the entrance to the building more than forty-eight hours after Bianchi and Moretti’s bodies had been removed. But that tiny piece of the puzzle was too small for him to notice.