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the last few years, but the previous Christmas had been too much for him, too much for Vicky. The job, he had admitted to himself on more than one occasion, was more fulfilling than his marriage had ever been. The only thing that got to Grant was that he had three children who needed a father, and he wasn’t there for them. He’d done the best that he could for the six years they were together, even buying a house in the north London area of Holloway. It had taken him two years to get enough money together for the deposit, and for most of that time he was begging for overtime from his boss. But Victoria never understood, never appreciated his efforts. At least that was the way that he saw it.
     
    The times when he’d come home at twelve or one in the morning, tired from office work or sitting in an unmarked car doing a surveillance job, didn’t seem to matter anymore. Sure, he was still paying the mortgage – and rent on a flat in Dalston – but he didn’t have as much time as he wished he could have with his three kids.
     
    The idea of their mother stepping out on the town with other men while he was still married to her, drove him crazy. What was worse about her new ‘man-friends’ as she liked to call them, was that they were little more than boys in his eyes. Boys who didn’t know what they were getting themselves into. One, a Jamaican man of around thirty, was known to Grant through his dealings with the police. He had been suspected of many things in the past, but nothing had ever been proven. Not that Grant hadn’t tried his damnedest to ensure a conviction for something. The very thought of this man, a criminal in Grant’s eyes, moving in on his family, drove him to despair.
     
    He had tried every trick in the book when it came to wooing back Victoria, but all were to no avail. There was nothing he could do in her eyes to make up for the past few years of neglect. The prospect of spending the rest of his life seeing his children at weekends, while another man slept in his marriage bed, was more than he could stand. What was worse was the thought of having to continue paying the mortgage on the house he had bought for them. Grant would, in effect, be paying another man’s rent while the guy screwed his wife. There was no justice when it came to relationships, he thought, driving through the rain to his flat in Dalston.
     
    The emptiness of the place hung over him like a guillotine waiting to fall on a condemned man. His last meal always seemed to be of the frozen variety, too. Five minutes in a microwave and PING! instant dog food waiting to scald your mouth. Grant had never really taken to cooking and was now suffering as a result.
     
    The absence of a vice in Grant’s life left him watching TV and reading books, where other men might have gone to the local boozer or, like many of his brothers, roll a nice fat joint of the best Jamaican weed. But drugs and drink weren’t his thing. Instead, it was frozen food and soap operas. He didn’t know which was worse; the wooden acting in the soap operas or the cardboard taste that all microwave food had. But then, it wasn’t something that he was inclined to dwell on.
     
    Tuesday morning, Carroll was late again and Grant was eager to get going. His blood was still boiling from the night before, having had a small run in with his wife’s Yardie boyfriend. He had driven up to the house, honked his horn, and Vicky had run around getting ready like a seventeen year old going on her first date. It was a sickening sight for Grant. It was hard to believe it was the same woman who was bitching at him on the phone earlier in the evening.
     
    The fingerprint people had been on to the CID squad looking for Carroll and Grant first thing on the Tuesday morning, having what they regarded as an almost positive identification of the woman found dead in Horseferry Road. The fingerprint technician, Hughie Osborne, gave her name as Joanne McCrae. He had said there was a