‘The traffic,’ he said. ‘We’re going to be all night at this rate.’

She looked down at the sheaf of papers on her black clipboard. ‘This is the last one,’ she said. ‘Chinese or something. God, I don’t think I can pronounce their names. Noog-yen Guan Fong and Noog-yen Goy Trin. Does that sound right?’ The names on the sheet were written as Nguyen Xuan Phoung and Nguyen Kieu Trinh.

He laughed. ‘Sounds like a disease,’ he said.

She gave him a frosty look. ‘It’s not really a laughing matter is it, Simon?’

Edgington flushed. Griffin was a year younger than him but she acted as if she already had her sergeant’s stripes. But his embarrassment came from the fact that he knew she was right, it wasn’t the sort of thing to joke about. He wanted to tell her that he was just nervous, that he was trying to relieve the tension that was knotting up his stomach, and that he’d never thought when he signed up three years earlier that he’d have to knock on the doors of complete strangers and tell them that their nearest and dearest had been scattered all over Knightsbridge by a terrorist bomb. He wanted to explain but knew he’d sound like a wimp so he concentrated on driving.

They’d been given three addresses, all south of the river. The first had been a middle-aged couple in Lambeth, a schoolteacher and his wife. Their teenage son had been in the passenger seat of an old Mini that had been fifty feet or so from the motorcycle when the bomb had gone off. Several pieces of wire that had been wrapped around the explosive had burst through the windscreen and torn his face and throat apart. The couple had already seen a report of the bombing on the evening news and before Griffin had spoken the wife’s legs had given way and her husband had had to help her to a chair in their cramped kitchen. Edgington had been quite happy to let his partner do the talking, he didn’t think that he could have kept his voice steady. He’d joined the police to catch criminals, not to act as some kind of messenger of death. And she’d done it so bloody well, sat them both down, made them cups of sweet tea, phoned their daughter and arranged for her to come round and look after them. She’d sat with them on the sofa until the girl came and then left them to their grief. All the time Edgington had stood by the kitchen door, feeling useless, but Griffin hadn’t mentioned it when they got back into the car.

The next call had been at a small flat in Stockwell. No relatives this time, but a boyfriend who burst into tears and hugged the WPC when she told him what had happened. They were going to get married, he’d sobbed. She was pregnant, he said. She held him until the tears stopped and sat him down and asked him if there was anyone she could call, a friend or a relative. Did she suffer, he asked. No, she lied. The sergeant had told them that the girl had died screaming on the pavement with both her legs blown off. ‘No, she didn’t suffer,’ she said without hesitation.