‘Piggy Philips has three convictions for criminal damage in an eighteen-month period in the late eighties,’ Whitestone continued. ‘As far as I can tell, the boys enjoyed smashing up the odd restaurant. Seems they couldn’t always buy their way out.’

‘Boys will be boys,’ Gane said. ‘Especially when Daddy’s picking up the bill.’ He snorted with contempt. ‘My dog could get five A levels at Potter’s Field. While licking his bollocks.’

‘Piggy Philips seemed happy to always take the rap,’ Whitestone said. ‘According to the local rag, he nearly went down for contempt of court one time. “Disorderly, contemptuous and insolent behaviour towards the magistrate”.’

We stared at the photographs, at the boys they had been, and then at the men they had become.

‘So they were a gang?’ Gane said.

‘It’s more than that, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘Most of them had known each other pretty much all their lives. One of them sounds as if he was happy to take the rap for the rest of them. It sounds like they were – I don’t know – almost brothers.’

‘But did that relationship end with their school days or did it endure?’ Mallory said. ‘That’s the next question. And we can start answering it by going to a funeral.’

He stepped closer to the wall.

‘What does it say on their jackets? The Latin just above the crest. I can’t make it out.’

Whitestone closed her notebook. ‘Aut vincere aut mori,’ she said. ‘Their school motto.’

‘Conquer or die,’ Mallory said. ‘Good motto.’

I found my eyes drifting to the boy in the centre. James Sutcliffe. The one without a smile, the one with the hidden eyes. The boy with the marks of self-harm on his arms who folded his clothes neatly and walked into the sea off the Amalfi coast. He was the only one not represented on the wall by a photograph of the man he had become. Dead by his own hand at eighteen. Even more than the pictures of the two murdered men, Sutcliffe’s unsmiling presence made the old school photograph seem heavy with mortality.

These boys are not growing up, I thought. They are rushing to their graves.

The late afternoon light was dying over Highgate Cemetery when the soldier rose from his place on the front row of the crowded chapel, immaculate in the black dress uniform of an officer of the Royal Gurkha Rifles.

Captain Ned King was a big man and he moved slowly to the pulpit, glancing at the large black-and-white photograph of the late Hugo Buck that was placed before his coffin. As Captain King stood in the pulpit, looking at his notes, a bar of the waning light came through the high stained-glass windows and caught him, glinting on the medals he wore on his black jacket and highlighting the white starburst of scar tissue on the left side of his face.