DAY NINE

WEDNESDAY

The Evening Standard is London’s only evening newspaper and covers the capital and most of the South-East pretty intensively.

Skinner was lucky. News through the night had been exceptionally light, so the Standard ran the sketch of the staring man on the front page. “DID YOU KNOW THIS MAN?” asked the headline above it, then came a note to turn to more details inside.

The panel gave approximate age, height, build, hair and eye colour, clothes worn at the time of the attack, the belief that the man had been visiting the local cemetery to place flowers on the grave of one Mavis Hall and was walking back to the bus route when he was attacked. The clincher was the detail of the leg shattered about twenty years earlier and the limp.

Burns and Skinner waited hopefully through the day, but no-one called. Nor the next, nor the next. Hope faded.

A brief coroner’s court was formally opened and immediately adjourned. The coroner declined to grant the borough the right to bury in an unmarked grave, lest someone might yet come forward.

“It’s odd and very sad, guv,” said Skinner to Burns as they walked back to the nick. “You can live in a bloody great city like London, with millions of people all around you, but if you keep yourself to yourself, as he must have done, no-one even knows you exist.”

“Someone must,” said Burns, “some colleague, some neighbour. Probably away. August, bloody August.”