She laughed. Good teeth. So white and even that there must have been an orthodontist in her childhood. Middle-class teeth. I wondered what her parents had been like and how they had dealt with her disability. As far as I could tell, it had not stopped her doing anything she wanted.

‘I didn’t do much,’ she said. She slipped a thin MacBook Air into a messenger bag. ‘But then – in my defence – they didn’t say very much, did they? I’ve run full voice biometrics of everything we have.’

I suddenly realised that it was unlikely I would ever see her again.

‘May I ask you something, Tara?’

She nodded, shoving back her hair, the wedding ring a glint of gold among the black.

I hesitated. ‘You don’t do the thing with the hands,’ I said.

She wasn’t offended. If anything, she just seemed a little weary, as if she had explained this one so many times that it was becoming a chore.

‘Signing? No, I don’t sign. Why – can you read sign language?’

I felt stupid.

‘No – I just . . .’

‘Not all members of the deaf community sign,’ she said, very patiently. ‘It’s a misconception that all deaf people sign. It’s very much a personal choice. I can speak and I can read lips. I don’t consider myself to be culturally deaf. That is, I don’t define myself by my lack of hearing.’ She zipped her messenger bag shut. Her desk was clear now. She smiled brightly. ‘OK?’

I nodded. ‘Thank you. For everything.’

I wanted to know more but there was no time.

Edie Wren was standing in the door of MIR-1 and beyond her I could see Dr Joe Stephen, checking his messages.

Tara Jones was ready to leave 27 Savile Row.

And the dead were waiting for me.

15

The three dead men lay naked on their stainless steel beds in the Iain West Forensic Suite at the Westminster Public Mortuary, untroubled by the temperature that is forever kept just a degree or two above freezing point.

The first thing you noticed about them were the large Y-shaped incisions on their torsos where Elsa Olsen, our forensic pathologist of choice, had chopped open their ribcages with exactly the kind of green-handled pruning shears you can buy in any gardening centre to trim your roses. And the next thing you noticed were the burn marks around their necks.

‘Cause of death was strangulation,’ Elsa said. ‘All three of them. Method of death was almost certainly some kind of wire noose.’

‘Not rope?’ I said.

‘Rope would probably leave trace evidence in their wounds,’ Elsa said. ‘And I couldn’t find any rope fibres. I suggest they used some other kind of material.’

‘And they know what they’re doing,’ I said.