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Miss Decima gazed out of the window. Then – very slowly, and with some relish – she took out her false teeth and placed them on the table beside her.

I felt my heart skip a beat. She always took out her teeth to help her think. I hadn’t seen her do it in months.

‘Stephen,’ she said, ‘are you familiar with Occam’s Razor?’

‘Is that whose knife it was?’

I could tell from the back of her head that she was considering shouting at me but decided she couldn’t be bothered.

‘Occam’s Razor is a principle which states that the simplest answer, with the fewest assumptions, is most likely to be the correct one. That is why Chief Constable Cartwright came to the conclusion that he reached last night. A police officer chases three women into a road; he is found dead, alongside a murder weapon belonging to one of the three women, all of whom have disappeared. All logic dictates that the women killed Watts, then fled.’ She steepled her fingers. ‘But what if there was an alternative explanation? What if this was, in actual fact, something incredibly complicated disguised to appear simple? A murder committed by someone seeking to exploit the principle of Occam’s Razor, to commit a murder in broad daylight, and get away with it?’

I gulped. ‘You don’t think what Mrs Pankhurst was saying, about the police framing the WSPU –’

She snorted. ‘Irrational, impractical, deluded. Mrs Pankhurst is missing the far more obvious reason that someone might choose to frame the suffragettes: they are the perfect scapegoat. Everyone hates them. The public regard them as dangerous harridans who want to unravel our society; the Home Secretary will find any excuse to get rid of them. Someone made it look as if the suffragettes killed Watts because everyone would willingly believe it. Conspiracies are all well and good, but one should never discount the possibility that this could be the work of one single, individual piece of shit. And, let’s face it, Stephen: this is London. We are surrounded by pieces of shit. Our job is to work out which piece of shit did it, and why.’

It was a pretty unpleasant mental image, but with that one word – ‘we’ – she had just made me the happiest man in Kensington. We were back in business.

‘Discussion over!’ she barked. ‘We have less than five days to solve this mystery before the female suffrage movement is destroyed. Make me a pot of tea and wheel me to the telephone. It’s time I rallied the troops. After that, you can head downstairs and reconnoitre the murder site. Eyes and ears, Stephen: I want your observational faculties working to their absolute highest possible standards!’

I beamed. ‘Anything else, Miss Decima?’

‘That will be all, thank you.’ She picked up the little silver bell with distaste. ‘I shall tinkle if I need you.’

I didn’t think it was possible to ring a bell with sarcasm, but she somehow managed it. I didn’t mind one bit. As I left the study to make her pot of tea, I might as well have been walking on air.

15

Sunday, 18 June, 1.23 p.m.

If you wanted to kill someone without being seen, you could do a whole lot worse for a murder site than Kensington Gore.

It was built like a maze, for a start. I always assumed you built roads so that people knew where they were and where they needed to go, but that didn’t seem to bother the people who’d designed the Gore. There were seven roads next to each other, all called Kensington Gore. The apartment blocks were tall and packed tightly together: they’d made the roads narrow and curved, so it was a series of blind corners – all shadow and no sky.

The crime scene was still cordoned off when I stepped out of the front door. I’d hoped to study the spot where Constable Watts had died, but there were two policemen on duty, standing with their hands clasped before them. They’d covered the pavement and wall with sheets, to hide the blood. They stared at me the moment I appeared, so I quickly bent down and pretended to tie my shoelaces so I could glance around.

I was looking for hiding places. Miss Decima believed that a killer had lain in wait for Watts – but where? There was nowhere I could see: the road was a dead end, there weren’t even bins to crouch behind.

Then it struck me. The sunken area behind the iron railings of each house. Every building had one, so the basement windows could get some light. I let my eyes run over the area of Number 89. It wouldn’t have been impossible, I thought, for someone to hide down there, then climb over the fence when Watts appeared and sneak behind him and …

The policemen at the crime scene were now glaring at me, most likely because I’d been tying my shoes for over a minute. I stood up, made a show of dusting off my trousers, then quickly strolled off. At first I didn’t have anywhere to go, but then I remembered the trail of blood on the cobbles. You could still just about make it out, running down the side road. Time to find out where it went.

I followed the trail, looking as casual as I could manage. There wasn’t much: a single spatter on the cobbles every few yards. The spatters ran from our road – Kensington Gore – down a side road – also called Kensington Gore – to the road at the end – Kensington Gore, again – before finally turning on to the main road. They grew fainter and further apart, like the blood was running out. Before long, I was having to strain my eyes to find the next one.

It was only then I noticed a funny feeling creeping over me. It had been easy to ignore at first – I’d thought it was the heat, which was as bad as ever. But now I realized it was something else entirely.

It was the feeling – slow and undeniable – that I was being watched.

I knew how it felt to be stared at. I’d spent weeks, months, even, feeling that everyone I walked past was scrutinizing me, searching for mistakes. I could feel it now, like eyes burning into my back. It had to be one of the police officers from the crime scene. He was following me, to see what I was up to. But, when I turned around, there was no one behind me. The road was empty.

I stood, baffled. Then I slowly raised my eyes to the windows lining the blocks that towered above me. There were hundreds of them. Someone – anyone – could be standing in the shadows, watching me from inside. Even the killer.

That’s the whole point of a city, isn’t it? You never know who’s around you.

I swallowed. If I was being watched, I couldn’t let on that I knew. I kept following the blood spots, my back burning every step of the way. I was trying to concentrate on the trail, but my mind was elsewhere. I was thinking about those windows. I was thinking about how many there were. I was thinking about how unlikely it was that not one person in all of Kensington Gore was looking out of their window when Constable Watts had –

‘Get out of the road, you f—!’

There was a sudden clatter of hooves right beside me, and I spun in panic as a milk-cart swerved to avoid me. I’d been so deep in my thoughts that I’d strolled right into the middle of two lanes of traffic on Exhibition Road. I hadn’t even noticed that the blood spots had ended ten feet ago. I watched the cart rattle away, the driver shaking his fist over his shoulder. Who the heck is delivering milk at midday on a Sunday?