‘Yes, I did notice,’ Katie said with a frown. ‘DCI Murphy doesn’t like to be kept waiting, so I wouldn’t take too long if I were you.’

‘Which desk is mine?’ Jane asked, wondering why Katie was being so cold and unfriendly.

‘That one over there.’

She pointed to a single desk in the corner of the room, next to another one on which there was a large police radio, a teleprinter and a computer for doing vehicle and name checks.

Although the squad room wasn’t as large as the CID offices Jane had worked in before, she noticed that all the other desks, apart from Katie’s, were organised in two groups of four and abutted each other. Stanley was seated in one group, with DC Baxter, DC Gorman and ADC Murray, and in the other group there was only Teflon and three empty desks, which were clearly in use as they had filing trays full of paperwork and case files on them. She knew that some of the team were out on another case but thought, as the only other DS on the team, she would have been given a desk with the others. She wondered if she had deliberately been put on her own to ostracise her.

She put her coat on the rack by the door and looked around the room. The large wall behind Katie’s desk was covered with artists’ impressions of robbery suspects, wanted posters and mugshots, as well as an array of surveillance and robbery crime scene photographs. There was also a large wallchart of the date, time and venue of all the cases they were currently investigating, and in the corner next to it there was a flip chart easel.

On the left-hand wall there was a large map of the north-east London area that the Rigg Approach Flying Squad team covered; it ran from Tower Hamlets in the East End to Enfield, Chigwell in Essex and Upminster, which was an area of nearly a hundred square miles. The map was covered with red, yellow and green pins, which, according to the handwritten guide beside it, signified where armed robberies on banks, building societies, betting shops and cash-in-transit vehicles had taken place. Jane was struck by the fact that the clear majority were red pins, which signified that firearms had been discharged, as opposed to yellow pins, which meant they hadn’t. Green pins, of which there were about half a dozen, meant someone had been shot. On the right side of the room there were several filing cabinets for case files and bookshelves with box files and clip folders relating to ongoing investigations. Jane recalled Dabs saying that Katie was fussy when it came to office tidiness, and could see that everything was laid out neatly and well labelled, making it clear what was contained in everything on display.