The older coppers always make it very clear that it’s just not good practice to get too involved with your victims. A murder inquiry can last weeks, months or even years and ultimately the victims don’t want you to be sympathetic. They want you to be competent – that’s what you owe them.

But still someone had stabbed James in the back and left his father flailing around in grief and incomprehension. I decided that I didn’t approve of that at all.

I asked some more questions relating to his son’s art work, but it was clear that the senator had been indulgent rather than interested. Guleed, who’d been watching me from the other side of the kitchen, managed to convey, by expression alone, the fact that she’d already asked all the routine questions and unless I had anything new I should shut up now and leave the poor bastard alone.

I was walking back to the car when Lesley phoned me.

‘You know that house?’ she asked.

‘Which house?’

‘The one that Kevin Nolan delivered his greenery to.’

‘Yeah,’ I said.

‘The one where he picked up all the crockery,’ said Lesley. ‘The very crockery that we have just found several metric tons of?’

‘The house off the Moscow Road,’ I said.

‘That house doesn’t exist,’ she said.

15. Bayswater

15

Bayswater

The British have always been madly over-ambitious and from one angle it can seem like bravery, but from another it looks suspiciously like a lack of foresight. The London Underground was no exception and was built by a breed of entrepreneurs whose grasp was matched only by the size of their sideburns. While their equally gloriously bewhiskered counterparts across the Atlantic were busy blowing each other to pieces in a Civil War they embarked on the construction of the Metropolitan Line knowing only one thing for certain – there was no way they were going to be able to run steam trains through it.

Experience with the established long tunnels of the mainline railways had proven that, unless you liked breathing smoke, you wanted to get through the tunnel as fast as possible. You certainly didn’t want to stay in there permanently, let alone stop at an equally enclosed station to take on passengers. So they tried pneumatic tunnels but they couldn’t maintain a seal. They tried superheated bricks but they weren’t reliable. They burnt coke but the fumes from that proved even more toxic than coal smoke. What they were waiting for was electric trains, but they were twenty years too early.