Denisenko hesitated and then nodded. He wiped his forehead with the back of his sleeve and flopped down on the narrow divan, which was covered with a sleeping bag.

'Right. I need you to tell me about the man you saw with Miss Tenison.'

'You mean Stella,' Denisenko said insistently.

'Yes, Stella, if that's what you want to call her.' They had discovered that Rachel Tenison had used a variety of aliases with the men she had picked up and taken home, all part of the role-playing game. To Denisenko, she was 'Stella'. 'You say she came into the bar where you were working just over two weeks ago.'

'Wednesday. I work there Wednesday.'

'It's in Covent Garden, isn't it?'

'Yes. I am very happy to see her, but she have a man with her. They do a lot of talking.'

'What did this man look like? How old? What colour hair?'

'I understand. He is older than Stella. Tall, like me. He has hair...a lot.'

'Your colour?'

'More dark. He look important man. Nice clothes. Expensive. I can tell.'

'Did you speak to her?'

He shrugged. 'I stay behind bar. She is busy with him. I don't want to embarrass her.'

'You said it was around eleven o'clock at night.'

'Yes.'

'Were they looking for something to eat?'

'No. They only have drinks. They have the red books for the opera er-' He waved his hand in the air, struggling to find the word.

'Programmes, you mean?' Feeney said.

Denisenko nodded.

She knew the bar in question. It was opposite the Royal Opera House and only a few doors along from the former Bow Street police station, where she had worked when she had first started with the Met.

'Stella is beautiful,' Denisenko said, spreading his hands. 'Like always. So beautiful. So...so perfect. My friend Micky, he serve them. Stella, she does not see me. They have drink and they talk. Then she get angry and she hit him. Like this.' He slapped his cheek with his hand. 'Now he is very angry. He stand up. He come to bar and ask for the bill and they go.'

It sounded like a replay of what had happened in the restaurant in Kensington. 'Would you say they were just friends, or more?'

Denisenko frowned. 'Friends? The way she look at him, I see she love him. This man, he is her lover.'

'You say your relationship with Miss Tenison ended many months ago,' Feeney said. 'Why was that?'

'Stella she say she does not want me. She tell me to go away, like a piece of trash. So, I go away.' He sat up tall, palms on his knees, shoulders back and stared proudly at her. 'I still love her but I try to forget. It is better that way.'

'But you still care about her? Am I right?'

He nodded.

'Were you jealous when you saw her with this man? Were you angry?'

Denisenko met her gaze with fierce, watery eyes. 'Missus Detective Constable. You make mistake. I do not kill a woman because I am angry. In this country, I clean the streets, I empty the trash and I work in bars because I have no money. Everything I get, I send home to my mother. But where I come from, I am educated man. In Kiev, I study history and politics. I am not primitive. I am not animal. Yes, I am jealous when I see her with this man. But I do not kill her.'

'Is this the man you saw with her?' Feeney said, taking a copy of the identikit picture of the man seen at La Girolle out of her bag and passing it to him.

Denisenko glanced at it and nodded slowly. 'Maybe. Maybe it is him. If he kill Stella, you find him, yes?'

'How did he pay for the drinks?' Feeney asked.

'He use credit card.'

'We'll need to get the credit card details from the place where you work so that we can trace him.'

Denisenko gave her a weak smile. 'Not necessary. When they pay, I tell Micky I feel sick. That I must go home. I wait until they leave...' He paused and looked down at the floor.

'You were upset?'

Denisenko nodded and bit his lip hard. 'I want to know who is this man.'

'You followed them?'

'Yes. I follow them.'

'And?'

'I know this man's name. I know where he lives.'

24.

'Do any of these faces look familiar to you?' Tartaglia asked. 'Are any of them the man you saw in Holland Park?'

Liz studied the four 10x8 colour photographs one by one, taking her time, hoping that something about one of them would leap out at her. Each man was attractive and young, certainly younger than Rachel, somewhere in their twenties or very early thirties. One was dark, three were varying degrees of fair, not that it made any difference. They had each been faceless as far as Rachel was concerned.

After a moment, she sighed and shook her head. 'I'm sorry. I don't recognise any of them.'

They were sitting opposite one another at a table in a bar on the corner of Portobello Road and Westbourne Grove, a block away from her brother's flat. The owner was Italian and the bar served exclusively Italian wine, along with a very small menu of good, simple things to eat. Neither she nor Tartaglia being particularly hungry, they had shared a plate of beef tagliata with rocket salad and were more than halfway through a good bottle of Barolo, which Tartaglia had insisted on ordering. The bar was one of her favourite local haunts and she had suggested going there, hoping that it might appeal to Tartaglia and that maybe he would ease up a little and tell her more about the case. But so far he was giving nothing away.

She handed the photos back to him. 'Who are they?'

'Men who Rachel met at various times in the past year.'

She smiled, amused at his discretion. 'Slept with, you mean. Don't bother to spare my feelings. It doesn't shock me. Did she pick all of them up in a bar?'

He nodded. 'They have alibis which check out for the time of her murder but I just wanted to see if any of them might have been the man you saw in the park.'

She thought back to the bunch of deep red roses lying on the ground in the woodland enclosure, wondering at the possible emotions that had gone into that simple gesture. The flowers were now wilting in a police lab somewhere, being tested for God knows what. But at least it appeared that someone had cared. She wondered if Rachel had affected any of the men in the photographs that much, if she had mattered to them at all.

'It's funny but I can't get all the stuff you told me about Rachel out of my mind. I keep asking myself why I never twigged what was going on with her. It makes me feel like an idiot.' She looked at the wine in her glass, holding it up to the candle for a second, admiring the colour. Almost the same as the roses. 'I'm also beginning to feel that I didn't know Rachel at all.'

'If she's a mystery to you, she's certainly one to me,' he said, with a distant look that she didn't completely understand.

She gazed at him curiously, wondering why he was so fascinated. Perhaps detectives always tried to immerse themselves in their cases, involving themselves with the victims, but she sensed there was something more to it than that. He too had fallen under Rachel's spell. What could she say?

'Rachel was a mystery to a lot of people, Inspector. It was one of her main attractions.'

'Tell me about the man you saw,' he said abruptly, as though wanting to change the subject. 'Try and describe him to me. It's very important we find him.'

Liz sighed. 'I can sort of see him in my mind but the e-fit didn't look right, or at least not how I remember him.'

'But you'd never seen this man before?'

'Definitely not,' she said firmly, wondering now if he again thought she was hiding something.

He looked thoughtful, then nodded, as though accepting what she said. 'OK. Let's try something else. Close your eyes. Think back to when you first saw the man and tell me what you see.'

She didn't think it would do any good, but wanting to please him she shut her eyes. Blocking out the music and general background noise in the bar, she pictured the dark, damp, coldness of the woods, the quiet, the smell of the earth and the leaves. She pictured the bench where she had been sitting, smoking; the branches of the holly tree arching over it like a canopy.

'Do you see him?' Tartaglia asked softly.

In her head she heard the squawking of the rooks. 'Yes. He's running towards me. But it's getting dark and he's just a blur at this point. Before he gets to me, he stops by the fence.'

'What's he doing?'

'I'm not sure.'

'Is he searching for a way in?'

'Maybe. He walks up and down for a moment.'

'So, he's not exactly sure where it is.'

'No.'

'Describe him. How does he look, how does he move?'

'Athletic. He's wearing dark baggy clothes and an anorak or fleece with a hood. I'm about thirty yards away. He's tall...'

'Taller than me? I'm six feet.'

She opened her eyes and looked at him, trying to compare the two in her mind. Tartaglia was an inch or so taller than she was; the man in the park had been taller, bigger, or at least that's what she thought at the time. She felt suddenly confused, not trusting her memory. 'I don't know. It's difficult to tell at that sort of distance. I had the impression he's tall, certainly taller than I am. That's all I can say.'

'What did he do next?'

She screwed her eyes shut, forcing herself to think back, wishing that she could remember things more clearly. 'He looks around, as though he's making sure nobody's there. The way he behaved made me feel nervous, like he was up to no good, or something. After that, I kept very still.'

'But he doesn't see you?'

She shook her head. 'As I said, the light was poor. I was sitting on this bench underneath a holly tree.'

'Does he look in your direction at any point?'

'Yes. Briefly.'

'Stop there and tell me what you see. Try and freeze the image in your mind.'

'OK.' She frowned, struggling to picture it again. 'I think he looks the other way first. Yes. Then he turns towards me. I see a flash of his face. He's white, anywhere between twenty and forty. That's all I can say. He has this hood pulled down low over his head so I can't see his hair or forehead. His features don't stand out at all.' She tried to visualise him more clearly but nothing came. Frustrated, she opened her eyes and reached for her glass. 'I'm sorry. I make a lousy witness, don't I?'

'You weren't that close to him and it must have all happened very quickly.'

'Yes. One minute he was there, the next he was gone. I didn't really think about what it might mean until afterwards, after he'd run off, when I went into the woodland area and found the roses. The problem is, the more I try to remember what happened, what he looked like, the more it seems to go away from me.'

'Memory's a strange thing. Sometimes it's better not to think too hard about something. Let your unconscious mind do the work. You may find it'll come back to you more clearly later.'

She sighed, annoyed with herself for not being able to remember better. 'Perhaps you should hypnotise me.'

'Let's try something else,' he said, after a moment. 'I'm going to go outside and walk down the road over there just past that lamppost. It's about thirty yards away. When I turn around, I want you to look at me, then tell me what you see.'

She watched him go out of the bar and across the road. The area was always busy on a Saturday, the street and pavement thronged with street vendors and tourists visiting the bric-a-brac stalls which lined the Portobello Road and Westbourne Grove. But the shops and stalls had closed up hours before and there was nobody around. As Tartaglia walked a little way down Portobello Road, Liz noticed that it had just started to rain again, the heavy drizzle visible against the orange glow of the streetlamp. A little way down, he took off his pullover and put it over his head like a hood, covering his hair, then he turned around, facing her. The hood changed his face completely. It was funny, she thought, how here was one of the best-looking men she had seen for a long time, yet at a distance, with his hair covered, he might have been anyone. It showed her how pointless the whole e-fit exercise had been and she felt disappointed.

After a few seconds, Tartaglia started back up the street towards her.

'Christ, it's cold out there,' Tartaglia said, once back inside. His black hair glistened with moisture in the low light and he gave his jumper a good shake before putting it back on. 'Now, what could you tell about me? I know the light's not the same, but what was your impression? Try and compare me to the man you saw.'

She looked at him thoughtfully, wanting to be helpful. One thing was for sure. The man she had seen looked nothing like Tartaglia.

'Well, your colouring, for a start. Even with that jumper over your head, I could tell you're dark. It's your eyebrows; they stand out. Thinking back, I realise now I can't make out this man's eyebrows or his eyes or lips; it's all a similar tone, and no shadows or lines.'

'So, he's fairish...'

'Yes. I'd say he was fair. Even at that distance, I could tell that your skin tone is darker.'

'Doesn't help that I need a shave,' he said ruefully, rubbing the thick shadow of stubble on his chin. 'Any other differences?'

She studied him, trying to be as objective as possible and not linger too long on any one feature, hoping he had no idea how much she was enjoying looking at him. 'Well, the general shape of your face is different,' she said, matter-of-factly. 'This man's was longer, less regular, maybe. I'd also say he's taller than you, bigger-built, although maybe it was just the anorak he was wearing.'

'That's very helpful. Is there anything else?'