The one I’d picked up featured the deserted railway lines. I looked in the corner for his initials.

But they were not there.

Instead there was a name I did not recognise.

Edward Duncan

I stared at the unknown signature, and then I picked up the other painting, the tunnel in the soft light of dawn or twilight.

j s

James Sutcliffe. Then who was Edward Duncan?

I placed the paintings side by side. And I saw what I had not seen before. The style was similar – so alike that it was easy to assume they were by the same artist. But the painting by Edward Duncan was different. It was different from the painting that had ‘j s’ in the corner, it was different from the painting on the wall of the Jones family home, and it was different from the painting on the wall of Khan’s office. It was something to do with the artist’s use of light.

Natasha was saying something to me. The dogs were at my feet and Scout tugged at my sleeve. But I could not tear my eyes from the painting.

Edward Duncan’s world was darker than the one James Sutcliffe knew. The light was not fading in his painting of an abandoned city.

It was dying.

Chapter 18

18

FIRST THING MONDAY morning I found TDC Edie Wren alone in MIR-1 reading a new post from Bob the Butcher on her laptop.

‘“If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendour of The Mighty One. #killallpigs.” A shy, unassuming fellow, isn’t he? You seen how many followers he’s got now?’

Wren had her laptop plugged into a workstation and on the desk screen I could see that she was logged into HOLMES. Every scrap of evidence produced during the investigation – Operation Fat Boy, they were calling it, after the attack on Guy ‘Piggy’ Philips – had been entered into HOLMES: witness statements, forensic reports, crime scene photographs, autopsy records, every bit of it tagged with a number, a security level and a priority status. Wren had HOLMES open at the Action Management page, a yellow document that would allocate the day’s work schedule for our team. But it was the social network site on her laptop that she was focused on.

‘Just sending Bob a message telling him how much I love him,’ she said. ‘Not much chance of getting a response, I know. But if he replies I can find his IP address in sixty seconds.’

I watched her sending Bob the Butcher some fan mail.

‘You’re good at this stuff,’ I said. ‘The whole digital thing.’

She shrugged with false modesty. ‘Good enough.’

‘Do you think we’ve done all we can to find him?’ I said.

‘Bob or the perp?’

‘I was thinking of Bob.’