Then another man, an older one, squat and ugly and with thick liver-like lips, followed the big man into the kitchen from the back door. Lil came up behind Angel, grabbing her shoulders.

‘What’s going on?’ she demanded loudly. She saw her sister prone on the floor holding her face and rushed angrily forward.

In the lounge, the phone started ringing.

149

When Cory Farmer got back to the station, he first went through the mug shots, trying to match the admittedly vague image in his brain with something on record. He spent an hour on that and found nothing. Then he phoned the number he’d got from Angel’s Aunt Lil, but there was no answer. He tracked down the archive file on Lenny Axelford, Angel’s ex. Grabbed a sandwich because Angel had walked out on lunch, and washed it down with coffee. Then he sat at his desk and waded through a lot of other police work, before pulling Lenny’s file and trawling through that.

The file made for interesting reading. Lenny had been a big-scale thief, one of the more successful robbing bastards in London’s fair city, and the whole Met had erupted in cheers when he was caught and sent down. Not that Farmer had been involved in that, it was mostly a Customs and Excise operation. He flicked through the whole sorry thing, thumbed his way through pictures of a lavish lifestyle that most honest people could never aspire to. Vast country houses. Barbados holidays, all five-star. Expensive motors. And . . . there she was.

He pulled out the photo and stared at it, long and hard. The shot was of Lenny, film-star handsome and looking as bent as a nine-dollar bill, his resplendent mane of thick blond hair framing his suntanned face, his arm around Angel. Obviously it had been taken at some dinner-dance sort of function; they were sitting at a table looking up at the camera and there were other people sitting beside them, the remains of a meal on the table. Angel was wearing a white sequin-spangled dress, low-cut, with no jewellery and with her hair swept up in a chignon. Both her and Lenny held champagne flutes and were smiling.

She looked fucking fabulous.

She’d been investigated thoroughly at the time because there was a suspicion that, as so often in these cases, the wife was a conduit through which the husband would funnel cash, buying homes, cars, jewels, designer dresses, anything. But nothing showed up about Angel doing that. All the dirty money had flowed through Lenny’s own hands and through his dummy ‘bureaux de change’ operation, leaving Angel with a more or less clean sheet. It was clear that she knew nothing about her then husband’s dodgy dealings so no charges had ever been brought against her, although some costly outfits, designer shoes and jewels had been seized as proceeds of crime. And she’d divorced Lenny soon after he was imprisoned. So . . . she was straight. On that matter, at least.