Bob looked at Delaney watching her. 'They reckon if a woman swings her hips like that, she isn't ovulating.'

Delaney looked back at him. 'That a fact?'

'Mine of them, me. f.u.c.k police work, I should have been a black-cab driver.'

Delaney couldn't be bothered to wait for the Guinness to settle properly and took a long gulp. 'Got a stupid question for you, Bob?'

'Shoot?'

'What's a belt buckle used for?'

Bob Wilkinson shrugged. 'Well, in the good old days it would be used to keep your women and children in line.' He grinned. 'Nowadays just to keep your dignity, and your trousers up.'

'Yeah.' Delaney nodded.

Bob frowned. 'Why do you ask that?'

Delaney shrugged and immediately regretted asking Bob the question. 'I have no idea.' He took another pull on his drink and as he put the pint down on the bar and gestured to Angela for a top-up, his mobile phone rang. Irritated, he pulled it out from his pocket but his expression changed as he saw who was calling.

'Delaney.'

'Jack, it's Kate.'

'I saw. What's up?'

'I need to talk to you.'

'What about?'

The large group at the bar started singing loudly. Kate said something on the other end of the line but Delaney couldn't catch it. 'Hang on, Kate, I'll take it outside.'

Angela watched him, puzzled, as he walked towards the exit. She picked up Delaney's unfinished pint. 'Does he want this or not?'

Bob grinned at her. 'I may be the fount of all wisdom, darling, but what I am not, is a psychic.'

'No, what you is, is an a.r.s.ehole.'

Bob nodded with a self-satisfied grin and took a sip of his pint. Some things you couldn't argue with.

Jimmy Skinner liked coming to Soho for very different reasons to the prison officer from Bayfield Prison. Jimmy had two vices. One was Internet poker and the other was Scotch. Unlike Delaney, however, he didn't drink it like lemonade. He treated himself every now and again with a small gla.s.s when he had won a high stakes game. He never drank when he was playing. That way disaster lay. You played the odds, you trusted the maths. What you didn't do was get drunk and risk all on chance, on the vagaries of the turn of a card. Lady luck was for losers.

Soho had a couple of great places to shop for the whisky connoisseur. One was on Old Compton Street and the other was on Greek Street. Just down from a bookshop specialising in spanking magazines and one of the entrances to the Pillars of Hercules, which was why he was more than happy with where Derek Watters had suggested they meet.

He stepped out of the whisky shop, pleased with himself. In his carrier bag a bottle of Johnny Walker Blue Label. A blended whisky but at one hundred and sixty pounds it wasn't the kind of stuff you found on special offer in the alcohol aisle of Tesco's. It wasn't about the money for Jimmy Skinner, it was about the victory. And victory always deserved to be marked, in his opinion.

He looked up at the narrow, black clouds scudding across an already dark and crimson sky then suddenly down again as he heard the sound of an engine screaming in high revs and the concurrent sound of tyres screeching on tarmac. He looked up the street and the carrier bag in his right hand slid from his open fingers. The bottle inside it hit the pavement hard and smashed. But Jimmy Skinner didn't register it all. He was too busy shouting, straining his lungs in the face of the gusting wind.

'Look out!'

But for Derek Watters as he spun round to the sound of the tortured engine, it was too late. Far too late.

The jet-black Land Rover Discovery hit into him still accelerating. The bull bar on the front of it crushed his ribs, splintering them and piercing his heart before the front of his head smashed down onto the bonnet. He was thrown back into the street as the driver stamped on the brakes and then into reverse, the tyres biting and screaming once more. As Jimmy Skinner ran across the road the back of Derek Watters head slapped hard down on the road with the crunching sound of a coconut being cracked by a hammer.

The Land Rover roared backwards into Soho Square, then drove round the green and, accelerating once more, shot up Soho Street and out into the busy traffic of Oxford Street, oblivious to the blaring of horns and sudden screeching of brakes, and disappeared as it turned left heading towards Marble Arch. Skinner watched it go, trying to see the number plate, but it had been taped over. He knelt down and put his fingers to Derek Watters's carotid artery on the side of his neck, though it was a movement made more by instinct than expectation. But, surprisingly, the prison officer had one last breath in him. As his eyes clouded over he looked at the tall, thin, bone-faced policeman kneeling beside him and sighed more than spoke: 'Murder.'

Then his eyes froze, motionless, and Derek Watters, forty-one years old, who never got to serve his country by bearing arms, died on a chill, wet street in a city that had a heart as cold as a solar system where the sun had died out many millennia ago.

Delaney sat behind the wheel of his car taking a moment to collect his thoughts. Adjusting the rearview mirror he looked at himself. He didn't know what had got Kate Walker so agitated, she wouldn't tell him on the telephone, just told him to meet her at the Holly Bush pub in Hampstead. He knew it well enough, it was just up the road from his new house. What he didn't know was what had got her so rattled; he could hear it in her voice, the thinnest form of politeness covering someone close to breaking point. It had something to do with what happened in the hospital car park that morning, he'd bet his life on it. Whatever it was that had gone down, the clear fact was that Kate needed his help. She didn't say it in so many words, but it was expressed in her barely restrained emotion. She needed his help. And that was the one thing Jack Delaney couldn't walk away from.

He'd put the mirror back in position, switched the engine on and slipped the gearstick into first, when his phone rang. He angrily slipped the gear back into neutral, glanced at the cover of his phone and snapped it open.

'Make it quick.'

'Jack. It's Jimmy Skinner.'

Kate Walker sat at the long wooden bar in the Holly Bush. Comforted on the one hand to be surrounded in the warmth and hubbub of familiar faces and voices of the early-evening crowd, and yet starting every time the front door opened. She wanted it to be Delaney coming through that door but was terrified of the notion that it would be Paul Archer walking in instead. She didn't know what made her suggest this pub to Delaney. She wasn't thinking straight. Hadn't been since she had woken up this morning to find that man in her bed. She took a sip at her b.l.o.o.d.y Mary. Cautiously. She had no intentions of getting hammered again tonight; besides, she was pregnant. G.o.d knows what she was going to do about that. And maybe she hadn't been raped. Maybe she was blowing things all out of proportion. She certainly had drunk a lot last night, maybe they had gone back to her flat, got paralytic and just pa.s.sed out in bed. But if that was the case, why couldn't she remember any of it?

She looked at her watch again. Where the b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l was Jack Delaney? It had taken all her nerve to call him in the first place and if he stood her up now, leaving her alone at the bar like a jilted teenager, she would kill him. She downed her b.l.o.o.d.y Mary and gestured at the barman for another. After all, two wouldn't hurt. Would they?

The ambulance pulled away from the kerb and drove slowly down Greek Street towards Shaftesbury Avenue. It had no need for sirens and lights. The police cars that had cordoned off the area, blocking traffic from Soho Square, Bateman Street and Manette Street, pulled away too. Nothing to see here either. Not any more, at least. Delaney leaned back against the painted gla.s.s of the p.o.r.no bookshop and put a cigarette in his mouth. He held the packet out to Skinner who shook his head then lit the cigarette with a lazy sc.r.a.pe of a match.

He inhaled deeply and looked up at the night sky. It was like a carmine canvas that an artist had dragged thick, soot-stained fingers across. Like the black fingers of blood that had crept along the cobbles where Derek Watters had been murdered. He exhaled a thin stream of smoke and looked back at his colleague.

'Definitely not an accident?'

Jimmy Skinner shook his head.

'Professional hit?'

'I'd say so. The guy didn't have a chance. Walking along the street when suddenly out of nowhere . . . Bang!' Skinner slapped one hand hard against the other.

Delaney took another thoughtful drag on his cigarette. 'And that was all he said. The one word.'

'Yeah. "Murder." Hardly the most insightful final utterance, seeing as I had just watched him being splattered halfway up Greek Street.'

'What's going on, Jimmy?'

Skinner shrugged drily. 'Looks like somebody doesn't want anyone talking to you.'

Delaney nodded in agreement. 'Looks like.'

'I'd watch your back, if I were you, Jack. Somebody going to all this trouble, easier maybe to just take you out.'

A cloud cleared the moon, throwing for a moment a spill of yellow light that reflected in the black orbs of Delaney's eye.

He threw his cigarette on to the road, the sparks flaring briefly then dying out as he crushed it under heel. 'Maybe.'

Kate sipped on her third or fourth drink. She wasn't drunk, just couldn't remember how many she had had. Time pa.s.ses in a different way when you're lost in thought. No matter what Einstein said, some things aren't relative. She tasted the fluid in her mouth, thin and liquid and she realised that all she was drinking was melted ice, any vodka in the gla.s.s long since gone. She rattled the gla.s.s and held it out to the barman, who refilled it and added the drink to her tab. She swirled it in her hand, watching the splash of red wine, which the Holly Bush always added to a b.l.o.o.d.y Mary, spin like a star system in a universe of its own. Like a black hole. Like the eye of Sauron.

Some time later she looked at the oak-framed mirror above the bar and could see the front door to the pub opening and a man with curly dark hair entering and her heart pounded suddenly in her chest and she struggled to breathe. She knew the symptoms. It was a panic attack. And being the doctor that she was, Kate knew that sometimes panic was absolutely the appropriate response.

A single, skeletal leaf was cartwheeling along the road. It was a dry, brittle, frail thing and it came to rest, finally, in the damp gutter that was already clogged with the decomposing corpses of leaves from the semi-denuded trees that lined the street. A street of wealthy people, whose lives behind the closed oak doors and wrought-iron gates were consumed with problems other than mortgages and council tax or the National Health Service. This was a street of financiers, of publishers, of authors and literary agents, of property developers and quant.i.ty surveyors, of Harley Street doctors and surgeons . . . and of a forensic pathologist who had, just that very day, sickened of death, and handed in her notice. The man in a car across the road from her house didn't know that, however, and it wouldn't have made any difference if he had. Her job, after all, had brought her to his attention in the first place.

He looked down at the pointed toe of his cowboy boot as it rested on the accelerator pedal and was glad he had gone for the snakeskin rather than the leather option. He could relate to snakes. The ability to move silently and unseen. The ability to shed one's skin. The ability to bare one's teeth and terrify. He smiled to himself humourlessly, and the light from the watching moon lent his teeth a cast the colour of old ivory. He looked across once more at the empty house and waited.

Hunters knew how to wait after all.

Jennifer Cole looked at the images on her Macbook laptop with professional detachment. A woman in a corset wearing old-fashioned seamed stockings and posing like a Vargas pin-up come to life. She was a full breasted woman in her late twenties, her bee-stung lips painted red with a hint of purple, the tip of her tongue visible and wet with promise, the pupils in her dark painted eyes wide with desire. She wasn't making love to the camera, she was f.u.c.king it. Jennifer flicked through the next pictures, some in uniform, some topless, some in elegant lingerie from Agent Provocateur. The burlesque look was very popular at the moment. A hint of goth, a hint of forbidden pleasure. Pain and pleasure, sugar and spice. She spent a lot of money on her lingerie and the photos that she used to update her webpage at least once a month. She probably didn't have to do it so often, but the truth was she enjoyed the ritual of it. The costumery and the perfumes, the candlelight and the moonlight. The black and red satin sheets. The artistry.

It had been a long time since Jennifer Cole had needed the money she made from her services. She had got into it, as most did, from need. But that need had pa.s.sed. She was selective now too. She didn't work every night and was extremely choosy about her clients. After all, that was the main thrill for her, the power she felt. She didn't feel degraded or used, just the opposite. It was her decision, her choice to make. And it was never something she regretted. She knew about the human body, how it functioned, how it was put together, what parts needed maintenance. s.e.x was just part of that. And it was fun.

She flicked forward to the last of the images. She was wearing a long fur coat that she had bought on a cruise trip to the Norwegian fjords one year. The real thing, never mind the paint-throwing hypocrites with their leather belts and shoes. It was mink, thick and luxurious. Her hair was piled high on her head with silver threads adorning and confining it. She wore silver boots with high platform soles and heels. The coat was open, her b.r.e.a.s.t.s jutting with the pride of the G.o.ddess Diana, her s.e.x cupped in the sculptured, rounded vee of a silk thong, and in her right hand a long, silver-handled riding crop.

Her small silver mobile phone rang and she answered it slowly, patting her hair as she looked at herself in the mirror. Her pupils widened as she licked her lips and purred.

'h.e.l.lo. How may I help you?'

If she'd been a cream cake, she would have eaten herself.

'Angelina. It's me.'

Angelina, her stage name as she liked to think of it, had been taken from an early American feminist hero of hers, Angelina Grimke, and not, as some had a.s.sumed, after the famous actress. She looked at the photo of herself holding a crop and thought it must have been an omen of sorts that he should have called just then. 'h.e.l.lo, bad boy. How have you been?'

There was a pause, then his voice, husky with desire. 'I don't think Santa is going to have me on his nice list this Christmas.'

'You've been naughty?'

The voice on the other end was breathy. 'Ooh, yeah.'

She could hear the need. 'I hope you're not being naughty right now?'

'Not just yet.'

'You want to come and confess to a superior mother?'

'Not today.'

'Oh?'

'I want you to come to me.'

'It's going to cost more.'

'I don't mind paying. Bad men pay for their sins, don't they? Sooner or later we all pay.'

'If they know what's good for them.'

'I know what's good for me.'

Jennifer Cole had only met the man recently. He had visited her a couple of times at her flat in Chalk Farm but she recognised the soft burr in his voice and knew one thing for sure: he was good-looking with kinky tastes. Just her kind of man. She didn't do this to pay the rent, after all.

'Where do you want to meet?'

'I thought we could go for a drink first.'

'It's your dollar, babe. You spend it how you want.'

'That's what I want.'

'Where?'

'Camden?'

'Sure. Tell me when and where.' She listened then hung up the phone and looked at her picture on her laptop again. Only the hair colour was wrong. Her midnight cowboy liked brunettes. She picked a wig off a stand and slipped it over her head. She stood up and picked up the long riding crop from one of her bedside cabinets and gave it a swishing flex in the air. She slammed the crop down hard on the bed with a satisfying thud and smiled. Christmas was coming early to Camden.

Hampstead was huddled against the weather. The scudding clouds had taken on weight and ma.s.s now, and although the wind still blew at a constant rate the swollen sky above was black and unbroken. The air was cold and threaded with moisture. Delaney looked up at the night sky, the moon now hidden behind the low wall of cloud that hung over the spread city like a biblical judgement. It shouldn't be so dark this early at this time of year, he thought as he looked at the entrance to the pub, deliberated for a second or two and then tapped a cigarette from a crumpled packet into his hand and searched through his pockets for his matches. The scent of the perfume Opium suddenly filled his nostrils and he realised a woman had come up to stand beside him. She was in her late twenties in a fake-fur coat and was holding a lighter out to him. Delaney was taken aback for a moment then leaned forward so she could light his cigarette.

'Thanks.'

'Not a problem.'

Her voice had the lyrical smoothness of the confident rich, one whose education had eschewed affectation.

Just like Kate's.

The woman closed her lighter and Delaney wondered why someone such as her would approach him, but then realised as the woman walked away and joined her friends that the gesture was just one of solidarity, of friendship. The fraternity of smokers in exile, gathered in groups outside every pub and bar throughout the country, united by the stigma of nicotine.

The woman's friends laughed a little and whispered something to her. She turned to look back at him curiously and Delaney realised he had been staring. He looked away and sipped some smoke from his cigarette into his mouth, then drew it deep so that it burned his lungs. Delaney was sure he saw something akin to pity in the young woman's eyes and the thought of it stung more than the hot smoke. What the h.e.l.l was he thinking of, buying a house in an area like this? He looked at the window of the pub behind him, bright with colour and noise, he looked through it at the shining faces with smiles full of porcelain, and voices ringing with the confidence of a golden future. He looked at the fashionable ties and slicked-back hair, at the Barbour jackets and coloured, corduroy trousers, and he thought of the dark-haired woman who waited for him at the bar and who fitted in among that crowd like a Hunter Wellington at the Chelsea Flower Show. He told himself he hadn't moved to be near her. It was to be near his daughter and his sister-in-law and her family. But as he ground out his cigarette on the cold slate beneath his feet, he realised the biggest sin was lying to yourself. The trouble was that, contrary to received opinion, the truth did not set you free. Sometimes the truth was an iron cage of your own fashioning.

He walked through the door, the sounds and chatter around him muted somehow, the light a softness like warmth as he threaded through the crowd and saw her waiting for him at the bar.

'h.e.l.lo, Jack.'

He could see in her eyes that the drink she held in her hand was not her first. But her gaze was steady and the warmth of her breath was sweet. Her lips had been stained by the tomato juice and Delaney wanted nothing more than to put his arm around her alabaster shoulder and kiss her.

Instead he pulled over a stool, sat beside her and gestured to the barman. 'Another one here please, and I'll have a large . . .' He hesitated for a moment. 'I'll have a large Bushmills. Straight up. No ice, no spittle.'

Kate handed her drink over to the barman. 'Vodka tonic please.' She smiled at Delaney. 'You can only drink so much tomato juice.'

'Of course.'

Delaney waited for her to say more but Kate turned her attentions back to the barman and handed Delaney his drink when it arrived. He took a sip of his whiskey and before he could ask her why she had wanted to see him, Kate spoke.

'I'm pregnant, Jack.'

And for the second or third time in his life the world rocked on its axis. Kate was saying something else but Delaney couldn't hear it. All he could hear was the blood pounding in his temples. He took another sip of his drink and tried to catch her words but failed. 'I'm sorry?' he managed at last.

'It's not a question of anybody being to blame, Jack.'