I was holding the photograph in my hands before I knew it. The silver frame was flecked with the first signs of age. And I held it for a long moment before I realised that the Filipina housekeeper, Rosalita, was standing in the doorway, watching me. She came into the room and began to clear away the tea things. I looked back at the photograph in my hands.

Soldiers, I saw.

Young men in uniform, I saw.

This was the same photograph I had seen in the shining tower, sitting all alone on the desk of Hugo Buck, splashed with his fresh blood. The same seven with the same unbreakable smiles.

And again I saw that it was only at first glance that it looked like a photograph of soldiers. Despite the old-fashioned military uniforms, these were boys, not men. Schoolboys dressed as warriors. No, not men, but boys who would not be boys for much longer.

One of them was the young unspoilt Adam Jones and the other, on the far side of the photograph, was the teenage Hugo Buck.

I had only known them a couple of decades later, as dead men, murder victims, drowned in their own blood. I had only ever seen them as corpses on stainless steel slabs in the cold room of the Iain West Forensic Suite.

But when you looked, when you really looked, they were both unmistakable.

‘I must have nodded off,’ Mrs Jones said, suddenly standing next to me, and so close and so unexpected that I almost gasped out loud.

She took the frame from me, looked at the photograph as if she had not seen it for a while, then replaced it exactly where it had been, in its little groove of dust on the black lacquer of the piano.

She’d wanted me to see, and she’d wanted me to understand, but I saw now that this courteous, kind and dying woman would really prefer it if I did not actually touch her photographs.

‘Did you ever meet Hugo Buck, Mrs Jones?’

‘Hugo? I haven’t seen him for, what, must be nearly twenty years. He went into the City. I understand he’s doing very well.’

‘And your son knew Hugo Buck,’ I said. ‘They were friends, weren’t they?’

She nodded. ‘At Potter’s Field. They were at school together.’

Chapter 7

7

I DROVE BACK to 27 Savile Row and for the rest of that day and for most of the next our team never left Major Incident Room One.

The discovery of the second photograph changed everything. It gave us our MLOE – main line of enquiry – and focused all of the double homicide investigation on seven schoolboys in military uniform, grinning at a camera twenty years ago.