‘I thought you might come alone,’ he said, squinting over my shoulder at Edie Wren.

‘I can’t do that, Paul,’ I said. ‘You know that.’

‘Trace, Interview and Eliminate,’ he said. ‘Right, Max?’

‘DC Wren, Homicide and Serious Crime Command,’ Edie said, holding out her warrant card.

Paul Warboys’ smile grew bigger. His teeth were the dazzling white of a game-show presenter. Then he nodded.

‘Put it away, sweetheart,’ he told Edie. ‘I believe you.’

We followed him into the living room. An English Bull Terrier padded across the carpet towards me, wagging his stumpy tail. I held out the back of my hand and the dog bent his magnificent sloping head towards me, confirming we had met before.

‘Bullseye remembers you,’ Paul Warboys laughed, scratching the dog behind his ears.

Bullseye had once belonged to an old face called Vic Masters, who I had found dead in a ditch on Hampstead Heath. Bullseye had stayed with me, Scout and Stan until Paul Warboys had come to claim his dead friend’s dog.

‘I never knew about your grandson,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry.’

He nodded briefly, folding up something within himself. He wasn’t from the generation that needed to share every emotion with the rest of the world.

‘Yeah. Well. Thanks. No reason why you should have known, is there? A little boy getting knocked down by a car. It’s not news, is it? The story got a paragraph here and there. But nobody was holding the front page.’

‘But I would have thought it was news,’ I said, as gently as I could make it. ‘The grandson of Paul Warboys . . .’

He laughed. ‘It’s news now!’ he said. ‘Now that bastard got hanged by the neck until dead.’ Another laugh, harder this time, and it was laughter in the dark, full of something bitter and raw. ‘Now it’s news!’

A woman came into the room.

A tiny blonde woman, maybe fifteen years younger than her husband, and she also seemed dressed for some beach far away, with the blue-and-gold batik wrap she was wearing and a tan the colour of teak.

‘Doll,’ Paul Warboys said. ‘This is DC Wolfe.’

‘The young man who looked after our Bullseye?’ she said. ‘Of course. Thank you.’

Doll Warboys shook my hand, and the chains on her tanned arms made the same sound as her husband made when he moved, a soft clinking sound, the sound of money in a life that had not been born into money.

‘Hello, love,’ she said to Edie, and I was reminded of the London I knew when I was growing up, where love was almost a punctuation mark, an endearment casually bestowed on total strangers. But when Doll Warboys smiled she seemed very tired, as if she had been awake all night tormented by old wounds.