If Phoebe answered I wasn’t listening, because I was thinking that the subset of St Paul’s parents that Phoebe knew personally was going to be finite. Maybe as low as ten to twenty males, and they’d all be on a list at the school. And that list could be cross-referenced with the list of Little Crocodiles and whittled down by finding out who had a reliable alibi for certain important dates. He’d been good at covering his tracks. But like Nightingale had said, he’s not Moriarty. He’s just another criminal and sooner or later he’s going to make a mistake.

And I was fairly certain that the Faceless Man had just made it.

9 The Tiger Hunting Committee

9

The Tiger Hunting Committee

The main purpose of an administrative meeting is to establish collective guilt for whatever fuck-up arises out of its decisions. That way, when the wheels come off you can’t pretend you didn’t know what was happening – because you were there, weren’t you? – when those decisions were made. And we’ve got the minutes to prove it.

In the normal course of events a lowly PC like me, if they’re sensible, finds themselves something better to do – paperwork, house to house inquiries, searching a landfill. Anything. Unfortunately, the Folly’s flat management structure, viz there only being two of us, and its specialist nature, meant that not only was I at the meeting, but I was expected to make a valuable contribution.

So here we were, in a sparsely furnished meeting room on the fourteenth floor of the Empress State Building at Olympia with representatives from the DPS, Belgravia MIT and the National Crime Agency. All chaired by one Deputy Assistant Commissioner Richard Folsom, who apart from being a wholly owned subsidiary of the Tyburn Preservation Society had it in for me personally on account of that business at Covent Garden.

Ask not for whom the buck stops, I thought, it stops for thee.

I noticed that Guleed had made herself scarce.

Folsom glanced at me – the tic over his right eye causing a twitch – before turning to Seawoll and asking him to bring us all up to speed on the current state of the investigation and our operational posture.

Which could be summarised as ‘confused’ and ‘ready to spring into action’ – just as soon as we had the faintest idea where to spring.

We’d held Phoebe Beaumont-Jones on Friday night because Bromley Crime Squad wanted a word about the MDMA. But since they couldn’t lay their hands on Aiden Burghley, the guy who allegedly sold her the gear, she walked out of the nick on Saturday afternoon without a charge.