Lucy shrugged. ‘Animal cruelty’s an issue we always take seriously.’

The vet smiled politely. ‘I’m sure, yes … but the main thing is, I’m an animal-lover, as you’d probably expect. But even I’m in a position where I must express hope that this thing, whatever it is, ends with the animals.’

‘I’m not following,’ Lucy said.

‘DC Clayburn … whoever’s responsible for this, I think it’s a safe bet that they’re not even close to being in their right mind.’

Chapter 24

Even by her usual standards, Sister Cassie realised that she’d walked some significant distances today, but thankfully she’d been able to acquire her medicine and take it just before sunset, adequately rejuvenating herself for the nightly round.

After that, she could sleep. Though she still had that policewoman to speak to.

She abruptly checked herself as she bypassed the row of taxis on Bakerfield Lane.

She ought not to think of Lucy Clayburn as ‘that policewoman’. She was a hard-working young woman, who maybe was a little intense, but was also personable and pleasant, and much less officious than the norm, and seemed to be completely at home in a job which, in Cassie’s youth, had been exclusively occupied by rough, gruff men.

Of course, that didn’t make it any the less inconvenient that Lucy wanted to speak to her; it would mean that she’d be disturbed late on, probably woken up from that deep, dreamless slumber her medicine eventually dropped her into.

Some thirty yards on, she halted beside a figure huddled under newspapers in a shop doorway. She crouched and began conversing with him, digging into her satchel to bring out her tatty, dog-eared prayerbook. His name was Albert, and he was a rail-thin young Irishman. The first time she’d encountered him, it had been later than this and quieter, and he’d jerked upward in fright, only smiling through his sores and his fuzz of beard when she’d come right up alongside him. He’d told her that she’d made an ‘eerie spectacle for an unprepared fellow’, her cloaked, cowled form ‘gliding like a spirit’. She’d assured him she was no such thing as she’d squatted down and tried to make him comfortable, and he’d believed her, asking only that she pray with him. She’d been happy to oblige then, and every night since. She did so now, saying with him first the Hail Mary, which both of them knew by heart, and then leaning close with prayerbook open, so they could read together and aloud that part of the Liber Hymnorum known as St Patrick’s Breastplate.