I looked at Stan’s cage. It was not a sound that had broken my sleep. It was the absence of a sound.

I knelt beside Stan, felt under him and beneath the blanket that covered his basket and pulled out the alarm clock we had put there to stand in place of his mother’s heartbeat. The battery had died some time ago. I smiled at him in the darkness and touched his soft red coat. Then I walked into the kitchen and dropped the old alarm clock into the bin.

Stan didn’t need it any more. He was home.

But under the door to my daughter’s bedroom, I could see that Scout still slept with all the lights on.

Chapter 30

30

SALMAN KHAN OPENED his front door unshaven and squinting in the pale morning sunlight, a baseball bat in one hand and a cigarette in the other. He held them both loosely, as if either might slip from his hand in a strong wind. He was in a dress shirt, open to his waist, with a black bow tie hanging around his neck like fresh roadkill. He looked like he had been wearing black tie to bed for a week.

‘Mr Khan,’ Wren said. ‘DCI Whitestone received a complaint—’

‘Because they’re not here any more!’ Khan gestured with his baseball bat. ‘The officers who were protecting me! The ones who were here after the – what is it? The Osman Warning!’

Wren smiled sympathetically. ‘Because the threat to your life is over,’ she said, all professional calm. ‘The perpetrator has been convicted.’

He laughed viciously.

We just stared at him, letting the laughter fade and then the silence grow.

Khan looked over our shoulders. There was a young Nepalese security guard on the drive. You were starting to see them all across London’s money-belt – private policemen hired to watch over just one wealthy street. The rich were getting scared.

But nobody was more scared than Salman Khan.

‘Thank you, Padam,’ Khan said.

The Gurkha saluted. ‘Sir.’

We followed Khan inside his house. A midget motorbike was resting against a double-sided winding staircase. Through glass panels in the marble floor you could see down into the basement area and the impossible blue world of an indoor swimming pool. You could feel its heat, taste the chlorine. Wren looked at me and I knew she felt it too.

These people have so much.

‘Your family are away?’ I said.

‘They can’t stay here! It’s too dangerous! If anything should happen to them . . .’

This was meant to be routine, one of the last jobs on the Action Book in the winding up of Operation Fat Boy. But Salman Khan could still smell murder in the air.

‘What are you afraid of, Mr Khan?’ I asked.

‘Are you serious? Some of my closest friends have died.’

He stubbed out his cigarette and immediately lit another one.

‘Mr Khan,’ I said. ‘Look at me.’