you, Sergeant. We're trying to teach her about strangers."
Nkata said, "Mums and dads can't ever be too careful in that department," and geared up his pen to take down notes.
Ritucci returned almost immediately, having deposited his older child somewhere in the house, out of sight. Like his wife, he apologised, and Nkata found himself wishing there were actually something he could do to make them more comfortable.
He reminded them that they'd phoned the Crimewatch number. They'd reported a boy wearing makeup who'd burgled them...?
Gail Ritucci was the one who told the first part of the story, handing over the spoon and the porridge to her husband who took up feeding their other child. They'd been out for the evening, she explained, having dinner in Fulham with old friends and their children. When they got back to Clapham, they found themselves behind a van in their street. It was moving slowly, and at first they'd thought it was looking for a space to park. But when it passed one space and then another, they became uneasy.
"We'd got a notice about break-ins in the neighbourhood," she said and turned to her husband. "When was that, Ron?"
He paused in his feeding of the toddler, spoon poised in the air. "Early autumn?" he said.
"I think that's right." She went back to Nkata. "So when the van crept along, it looked suspicious. I took down its number plates."
"Well done," Nkata told her.
She said, "Then we got home and the alarm was going off. Ron ran upstairs and saw the boy just as he went out of the window and onto the roof. Of course, we phoned the police at once, but he was long gone by the time they got here."
"Took them two hours," her husband said grimly. "Makes you wonder."
Gail looked apologetic. "Well, naturally, there must have been other things...more important...an accident or serious crime...not that it wasn't serious to us, to come home and find someone inside our house. But to the police..."
"Don't make excuses for them," her husband told her. He set down the porridge bowl and the spoon and used the edge of a tea towel to wipe the residue from his young child's face. "Law enforcement's going down the toilet. Has been for years."
"Ron!"
"No offence intended," he said to Nkata. "It's probably not down to you."
Nkata said no offence was taken, and he asked them if they'd given the number plates of that van to their local police.
They had done, they said. The very night they phoned. When the police finally showed up on their doorstep-"Must have been two A.M. then," Ritucci said-it was in the person of two female constables. They took a report and tried to look sympathetic. They said they would be in touch and in the meantime to come down to the station in a few days and pick up their report for insurance purposes.
"That was the end of it," Gail Ritucci told Nkata.
"Cops didn't do a bloody thing," her husband added.
ON HER WAY to meet Lynley in Upper Holloway, Barbara Havers stopped by the ground-floor flat, which she'd been passing assiduously with her eyes directed forward for ages by this point. She carried with her the peace offering she'd bought off Barry Minshall's stall: the pencil-through-the-five-pound-note trick meant to amuse and delight one's friends.
She missed both Taymullah Azhar and Hadiyyah. She missed the casual friendship they shared, dropping by one another's digs for a chat whenever the fancy took them. They weren't family. She couldn't even say they were the next best thing to family. But they were...something, a piece of familiarity and a comfort. She wanted both back, and she was willing to eat humble pie if that was what it was going to take to put things right between them.
She knocked on their door and said, "Azhar? It's me. Have you got a few minutes?" Then she stood back. A dim light shone through the curtains, so she knew they were up and about, perhaps shrugging into dressing gowns or something.
No one answered. Music's on, she told herself. A radio alarm that hadn't been shut off after it awoke the sleeper. She'd been too quiet in her attempt. So she knocked again, harder this time. She listened and tried to decide if what she heard behind the door was the rustle of someone disturbing the curtains to see who'd come calling so early in the morning. She looked towards the window; she studied the panel of material that covered the panes of the