He planned to call and check on Simmons around nine, and he had arranged to meet Natasha’s school friend, Rebecca Arnold, around lunchtime. She had been away for a few days visiting a friend, but was due back into King’s Cross around noon. He drained the last of his coffee and spun away from the window to face his computer. He fired up Google and set about tracking down anything he could in the public domain about Alexander Locke, Nathan Barclay and James Bolton. There was very little about Barclay and Bolton, but after reading the first few articles on Alexander Locke, things took an unexpected twist.

Locke might have kept a low profile as far as the law was concerned, but he had featured quite recently in the local press, half a dozen times in the last twelve months to be precise, as well as a string of older search results. It seemed he had a reputation as a local philanthropist, donating undisclosed sums to a number of charities. There were pictures of him in front of a community centre he’d helped fund the rebuilding of, a shot of him with a local MP at a fundraiser for a nearby kids’ football team. The third one he read stopped him in his tracks. Locke was wearing a traditional-style tuxedo, flashing his pearly whites for the camera. He looked every inch the successful businessman, but it wasn’t Locke that made him catch his breath, it was the man whose shoulder his arm was around.

Shit, that’s all we need.

Porter leant back, arms crossed, resting his chin in one hand while he took in this latest development. The picture on his screen showed Locke arm in arm with the deputy commissioner, Adam Nesbitt, at a fundraiser of some sort. The last thing they needed if they ever made an arrest was for a picture like this to surface in the tabloids. The deputy commissioner attended dozens of these events, and probably wouldn’t even remember posing for the picture, but that wouldn’t bother the journalists. They would sink their teeth into that and gorge on the story for weeks. He’d have a word with Superintendent Campbell when he came in. The politics of the job could be like quicksand if you weren’t careful, and if it surfaced some other way, making Campbell look bad, he’d make Porter pay somewhere down the line.

Porter looked up to see Styles coming through the door. He reminded Porter of a basketball player or a high jumper: he was all limbs, zigzagging between desks like an NBA shooting guard dribbling around his opponents.

‘Bit keen today, aren’t you? You’ll show the rest of us up. Did you bring an apple for the teacher as well?’

‘Couldn’t sleep. Had an interesting morning already, though.’