Somewhere between the second and third glass of champagne, Gemma kicked off her shoes.

The blessing had been short, simple, and beautiful, a celebration of their relationship as partners in life, and Gemma couldn’t have imagined anything more perfect. The children had behaved with remarkable decorum, even Toby, and most of the guests had been a bit teary-eyed—as had Duncan and Gemma themselves.

Afterwards, Bach had given way to reggae, then eighties pop and sixties soul. The happy couple had been toasted, and they had all eaten, and drunk, and danced, and finally Gemma and Duncan had made a great show of cutting their respective vanilla and chocolate cupcakes.

Gemma’s parents had stayed, and even seemed to enjoy themselves, although they’d picked at Betty’s lovely Caribbean food. But by the cake stage, Gemma could tell her mum was beginning to tire, and they had left soon after.

Most of the other guests had followed as it began to get dark, including Hazel, Tim, and Holly. Gemma had walked Hazel to the door and hugged her.

“Thank you for everything. I’m glad you’ve come back. Although you are surely the most devious person I know—after Duncan.”

“Thank you, I think.” Hazel laughed. “Maybe I should think about becoming a wedding planner. Or a spy.”

Now Gemma sat in the kitchen, rubbing her aching feet. Duncan and Betty were doing the washing-up, while Wesley, Melody, and Doug, the stragglers, clustered round polishing off a huge pot of tea Wesley had made. The children were playing in the garden with the dogs, and Gemma felt utterly, blissfully content. For the hundredth time, she held up her left hand and admired her ring.

It was Art Deco, a platinum band set with small diamonds. Henri and Erika had helped Duncan pick it out from a jeweler in the antique arcade on the King’s Road.

“You can change it if you want,” Duncan said, teasing her from the sink.

“No way.” She wrapped her right hand protectively around her left. “You’re not getting this off me for anything.” He’d bought a plain white-gold band for himself, assuring her that it was all he needed.

When the doorbell rang, Gemma stretched and said, “I’ll get it. Someone must have forgotten something.”

But Wesley jumped up, flashing Duncan a conspiratorial grin. “No, I’ll go. You rest your battered feet.”

There were voices from the hall, then Wesley came back into the kitchen, his arm draped casually round a young woman’s shoulders. A familiar tall, auburn-haired woman in surgical scrubs.

Gemma stood, laughing. “Bryony! What are you doing here?” Bryony Poole was their friend as well as their veterinarian. It looked as though Wesley had seen her more recently than Gemma, as there had been something definitely possessive in the way he’d guided her into the room.

“Congratulations.” Bryony hugged Gemma and Duncan, then gestured at her blue scrubs. “I’m so sorry to turn up like this. I had afternoon clinic and couldn’t reschedule. Wesley told me about the wedding the first of the week, but Gavin’s on holiday in Spain, so there was nobody to take over.” Gavin was Bryony’s not particularly well-liked boss. “Have I missed all the fun?”

“No, nor all the champagne.” Gemma poured her a glass from the bottle still standing in a tub of ice.

Bryony raised it to them before she drank. “To the happy couple.”

“Holidays in Spain must be the thing for vets,” Gemma said, sitting down and pouring herself another cup of tea. She told Bryony a bit about their investigation into John Truman’s possible connection with Naz Malik’s murder, leaving out Truman’s name. “Would it be easy for a vet to set aside enough ketamine to stop a man breathing?” The vision of Naz Malik’s body in the park brought the case back with a sickening jolt.

“Well, as little as a gram can be fatal. You can dissolve it—that’s one of the reasons it’s a good date-rape drug—but you might taste that much in a drink.” Bryony swirled her champagne.

“There was Valium in his system, too.”

“There you go, then. First you use the Valium as a relaxant, then you administer the ketamine as a dissociative. Same thing an anesthetist does before you have surgery.”

“An anesthetist?” Kincaid turned from the sink.

“Yeah, sure,” said Bryony, looking a little surprised. “Ketamine is best known as a veterinary drug, but anesthetists use it, too. It’s just much easier for street dealers to steal the stuff from a vet clinic than a hospital.”

Kincaid stood, hands dripping. “Anesthetist. Shit.”

Betty turned, perhaps surprised by his language, but when Gemma saw his face, she held up a hand in a command for silence. She knew that expression all too well.

Wordlessly, Betty handed him a tea towel.

But Kincaid merely crumpled it, as if he had no clue as to what it was for, then tossed it away and wiped his hands on the trousers of his good suit. “Of bloody course. Why didn’t I see it?”

“See what?” Gemma felt the world rock to a stop.

He looked at her, focusing on her face. “There’s an anesthetist on the bloody list. Alexander. Doug and I met him at Ritchie’s club. He came up and introduced himself. He was one of Sandra’s patrons. And Ritchie said something about his sponsorship of a women’s health clinic.”

“Rivington Street,” Gemma whispered. “Oh, my God. The clinic in Rivington Street.” In her mind, the pieces began to fall together with dreadful clarity. “Alia talked about how involved Sandra had been with the work there, and then she said something about Mr. Miles not actually seeing the patients, because they were only comfortable with women doctors, but I didn’t make the connection.”

“Miles Alexander,” said Cullen. “That was his name.”

Gemma felt the blood drain from her face. “He works at the London. Mr. Alexander, the consultant. It must be the same man. He was the anesthetist on my mum’s procedure. Dear God.”

“We saw him the day of the postmortem.” Kincaid started pacing and the others shifted a bit to give him room. “In the corridor by the mortuary, as we went to Dr. Kaleem’s office. I knew he looked familiar. He must have been checking on Kaleem’s results. Do you suppose there was something Kaleem missed?”

“Or maybe he was checking to see if there was anything he had missed,” Cullen suggested. “Kaleem said he thought he remembered Naz’s mobile phone being in a different place in the evidence bag, remember? And that day when he spoke to us in the club, was he trying to find out what we knew?”

“Maybe,” Kincaid said. “Or maybe it was just plain bloody arrogance. Him deigning to play a little game with us.”

“Wait.” Melody had been listening intently, but now she shook her head. “You’re making huge assumptions here.”

“No, it all fits,” Gemma said with a certainty that made her feel cold. “He knew Sandra, and probably quite well through their connection with the clinic. He bought her work. He had access to the drugs used to kill Naz, and the knowledge to use them. Lucas Ritchie’s club would have provided a connection to Truman, and possibly others like him, if they shared an interest in little girls.

“The question is, what made Sandra connect the Bangladeshi girl’s story with this doctor she knew, and probably trusted?”

Betty stepped forward, twisting Kincaid’s discarded tea towel in her hands. “I’m not followin’ all these things about girls and clubs. But do I understand that what you are sayin’ is that our little Charlotte’s mother is dead?”

“Yes.” Gemma rubbed the sudden ache in her cheekbones and blinked back the prickle of tears. “I think I’ve always known that Sandra Gilles was dead. The question was always why, and how, and who.”

“And the daddy,” said Betty, “Mr. Naz? You think this same man killed him?”

“Charlotte told me that her dad had gone to look for her mum, but I didn’t listen to her, not properly. Maybe Naz learned something that day. Maybe he went to talk to Alexander. Maybe he was fishing for information and didn’t want to refuse when Alexander offered him a drink.”

“That would explain where Naz was in those missing hours between the time he left the house and the time he died in Haggerston Park,” said Kincaid. “If he went to see Alexander, Alexander could have drugged him and kept him in the house until it was almost dark—”

“And he could get him to the park,” finished Gemma. She turned to Bryony. “How long would the fatal dose of ketamine have taken to act?”

“Not long. And it was probably injected, as it would have been difficult to get liquid down someone already incapacitated. It might have been a puncture mark under the tongue that your pathologist missed. Did your killer intend the death to look like a suicide?”

“If so, he should have moved his head into a more natural position, after he watched him suffocate.” The thought of what Alexander had done made Gemma feel ill. “Maybe he thought someone was coming and cleared off a bit too soon.”

Cullen had his phone out and was tapping the keys. Looking up, he said, “Miles Alexander lives in Hoxton. I’ve just checked the address. It’s one street from John Truman. And a ten-minute walk from Columbia Road market.”

Gemma saw it all, so clearly now. “What if, when Sandra left Charlotte with Roy that day at the market, she meant to pay a quick call on Alexander? She’d have assumed she’d be back in time to pick Charlotte up and meet Naz for lunch.”

If this were true, she’d been right about Sandra having walked someplace not far from Columbia Road, but she’d focused on the wrong direction, south and east, towards Bethnal Green and Sandra’s family, not north and west, towards Hoxton.

“She meant to be back for an ordinary Sunday lunch with her husband and daughter. Whatever she suspected, she couldn’t have had any idea how dangerous he really was.” Clamping down on the wave of fury that poured through her, Gemma looked at Kincaid and managed to say levelly, “Can we bring him in now?”

Kincaid frowned. “I think we’ll have a patrol car pick up Alexander, on suspicion of Naz Malik’s murder.”

“But we don’t have a direct connection between Alexander and Malik,” protested Doug.

“Sandra is the connection. And there will be others—we just have to find them.”

“Then why don’t we get a team going door-to-door in his road?” Doug argued. “Maybe someone will have seen Naz, or Sandra, going into his house. That way we could serve a warrant, and pick him up at the same time. That would shake him up.”

Kincaid shook his head. “If we start knocking on doors, even in plainclothes, I guarantee you Alexander is going to get wind of it. And if he does, he’s going to get rid of all the evidence he can.”

He stabbed a finger at them for emphasis. “I want more than evidence tying this bastard to Naz Malik’s and Sandra Gilles’s murders. I want him for human trafficking, too, and that means I want his computer, his photos, any little girls’ clothing—all the things he’s likely to have in that house that he could easily wipe or toss.”

Thinking it through, Gemma said, “But if he is connected with Truman, we may have already blown it. Truman may have told him we were asking questions about Naz and Sandra, and the girls.”

Kincaid rubbed a hand over his jaw and paced a few restless steps. “Maybe. But there’s always the possibility that Truman might turn out to be useful. We’ll bring him in, too—threaten to charge him as an accessory to human trafficking. If he really is involved, he’s the sort who might be willing to roll over on Alexander to save his own skin. It’s worth a try, and I want Alexander a lot more than I want Truman, the little tosser.”

He glanced at his watch. “Doug, let’s get a car on its way to Hoxton. And then get a team out. Let’s see if we can find any neighbors at home who might have seen Naz or Sandra.

“Once we get Alexander out of the way, we’ll have another team start going through his rubbish. We can do that without a warrant. It’s Saturday—hopefully he’ll have left something interesting in the outside bins for next week’s collection.”

He went to Gemma and looked down at her, putting a hand on her shoulder. “I’m sorry, love,” he said softly. “It’s not quite what I had in mind for our wedding night. I’ll ring you—”

“The hell you will.” She gave his hand a squeeze and stood up. “Betty, Wesley, could one of you stay and look after the kids?” Turning back to Duncan, she added, “We’ll spend our wedding night together one way or the other. I’m going with you.”

Gemma stood in the corridor outside the interview room at Scotland Yard. Kincaid had gone to deal with the arrival of Alexander’s solicitor, leaving her to stare through the window in the interview room door. She’d recognized Alexander instantly from that brief meeting in the hospital ward.

He looked as sleek and self-satisfied now as he had then, and more annoyed than concerned. And yet this man, she felt quite certain, had callously, remorselessly, snuffed out two lives, and put a child’s future at risk. Charlotte’s future.

How many other lives had he ruined? Children taken from their homes and families, raped, kept prisoner, and then…what? Abandoned like rubbish, castoffs for those who were willing to settle for soiled goods? Or put out on the street, where their only choice would be to earn a living as prostitutes?

When the uniformed officers arrived, Alexander had been hosting a dinner party for three other men, and the sergeant in charge thought he’d caught a glimpse of an Asian girl in the kitchen. He hadn’t been able to go in, but he’d not allowed Alexander to talk to his guests alone before he’d ushered him out of the house and into the panda car.

Alexander had been delivered to the Yard, icily furious and demanding his solicitor.

But Kincaid’s plan to play Truman against Alexander had failed. The team sent to Truman’s house found it dark and shuttered, and although Kincaid had ordered a car to keep an eye on the house in case he returned, Gemma was afraid yesterday’s visit had frightened the vet into doing a runner.

If only they’d realized, yesterday, who the real perpetrator must have been. Now, without Truman’s corroboration, they might have to let Alexander go before they could convince a magistrate to give them a warrant to search his house and car.

Their best hope was the team led by Cullen, knocking on doors in Alexander’s quietly respectable Hoxton Street. Melody had insisted—Gemma thought somewhat to Cullen’s chagrin—on going along.

But it was late, getting on for midnight, and Gemma suspected they’d be more likely to get complaints from the neighbors than cooperation.

She rubbed her ring against the lapel of her jacket to polish it. The band was the only tangible reminder that the afternoon had not been a dream. She’d taken the time to change from her lovely dress into jacket and trousers. She didn’t intend to face Alexander in her wedding finery, and face him she meant to do, no matter how long it took.

But would she have another chance to speak to him without a solicitor present? She looked up and down the corridor. There was no sign of Kincaid returning. Taking a breath, she opened the door and went in.

Miles Alexander sat at the table in his bespoke suit, studying his nails. He looked up at the sound of the door, then raised an eyebrow in an expression of mild interest.

“Haven’t I seen you before?” he asked.

“I met you in hospital,” said Gemma. “My mother had a shunt put in her arm. You were her anesthetist.”

“A ginger-haired woman.” He smiled, as if pleased by his recollection. “Leukemia. Not a good prognosis, I’m afraid.”

The remark was deliberately, casually cruel.

Refusing to let him see that the taunt had hit its mark, Gemma smiled back. “Do you always have such a good bedside manner, Mr. Alexander? Or did you choose your speciality because the patients couldn’t talk back?”

“Oh, aren’t you the wit. I’m sorry, but I’m afraid I don’t remember your name.” Alexander seemed unperturbed. “Nor do I have to speak to you, although you do seem to be conscious.”

“I can’t question you, no. But I can say whatever I like.” She moved a step closer, and wondered if she were imagining the metallic, slightly chemical smell of him. “You see, I know you murdered Sandra Gilles and her husband. And I don’t intend to let you get away with playing God.”

“Then I’d say you have a rather elevated self-image, and a very active imagination.” Alexander smiled again, but she had seen the glint in his eyes, like the flash of a snake moving in the grass.

It was only then that she realized she’d been harboring the tiniest shred of hope that Sandra Gilles was still alive. She turned and left the room.

A few moments later, she was leaning against the corridor wall, her eyes closed, when she heard footsteps. She opened her eyes and saw Kincaid, alone.

“Where’s Alexander’s lawyer?” asked Gemma.

“Rethinking his strategy, I suspect. He said he needed to make a phone call.”

“Why? What’s happened?”

“Good news for us,” Kincaid answered, but his expression was grim. “Doug and Melody came up trumps. Mr. Alexander’s next-door neighbor came home after an evening out. She’s a single mum, apparently, and was only too happy to talk about the odd goings-on next door.

“She didn’t recall seeing Naz or Sandra. But”—he forestalled her disappointment—“she did tell them that she’d been worried about the young girl she’d seen in the house, sometimes looking out a window, a few times peeking through the open door when Alexander was coming or going.

“Once she stopped Alexander and asked if his little girl might like to play with her own daughter. He told her the girl was his housekeeper’s child, and more or less to mind her own business.

“But the mum says she never saw a housekeeper. And not long after that, she stopped seeing the girl, too.”

“When?” asked Gemma. “When did she last see the girl?”

“She said she was sure it was in May. Her wisteria had just finished blooming.”

Gemma stared at him in dismay. “And she said child? Not a teenager? Not the girl who came into the clinic?”

“A little girl not more than ten or twelve, she told Doug. Asian, wearing traditional dress. I’ve rung the magistrate. We should have a search warrant by daybreak.”