The rush-hour traffic on both sides of the boulevard crawled noisily in frustrated fits and starts, carrying weary breadwinners home after long, noisy, dissatisfying days in anonymous offices. It was just another dark winter evening in Brussels.

Bannerman walked west from the Métro at the Porte de Namur, brushing the shoulders of people hurrying the other way, getting wet from the snow and catching the drips from passing umbrellas. It was odd, he thought, how you were no more a stranger in a busy street at the rush hour in a foreign city than you were in your own home town. They were the same faces you passed anywhere. The same people you didn’t know that lived the same lives in which you played no part. He might have been just like them.

There was a time when perhaps he would have married, raised a family, mortgaged a house in the suburbs, taken a safe job in the city, and been hurrying home like everyone else with nothing more to worry about than what TV show he would choose to while away the evening. There had been that time, but it had long since passed. He had made his choices, and some of them had been made for him. He hardly ever regretted them, though there were times when he lay alone in the dark listening to dogs barking in the night and wondered how it might have been if he had followed the well-worn path, how it might have been to have had someone to come home to, someone to share a life with. But thoughts like those came only in the darkest hours, and usually he would decide it was as well things had turned out the way they had.

A newsboy was standing under the awning of the Café Auguste, a bundle of evening papers under his arm. He had no need to shout. Business was good. News was bad. They were still carrying the story of the shooting and the girl’s drawing. People liked to sit back in comfortable armchairs in front of warming fires after their evening meal and read about the horrors of life from the safety of their own little boxes. So long as it didn’t touch them directly.

Bannerman bought a copy of La Belgique Soir and glanced briefly at the front page. There were pics of the death house, single-column pics of Gryffe and Slater and a reproduction of the drawing. The byline was Richard Platt’s.