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'It's dragging on, Lucia.'

'It's been a week.'

Cole nodded. He sat with his elbows on the desk, his fingertips pressed together, his knuckles slightly bent. 'It's been a week.'

'I don't know what you expect me to say, sir, but — '

'What's the hold up, detective? Why is this taking so long?'

Lucia shuffled. She opened her notebook on her lap.

'Don't look in there. Look at me.'

'Five people died, sir. That's four murders and a suicide. What do you want me to say?'

The chief inspector rolled his eyes. He levered himself from his chair and creaked until he was standing. He plucked a cup from the stack beside the cooler and drew himself some water. He took a sip, winced as the cold bit his teeth and then settled himself on the edge of the desk.

'Five people died. All right then. Where did they die?' He looked at Lucia but did not wait for her to answer. 'In the same room. And how? By the same gun, at the hands of the same gunman. You have a murder weapon, a motive, a room full of witnesses.' The chief inspector looked at his watch. 'I've got an hour before I'm due to go home. I could write your report and still knock off twenty minutes early.'

Lucia was looking up at him now. She tried to nudge her chair backwards an inch but the front legs just lifted from the floor. 'I have a motive. What motive do you think I have?' 'He was whacko. A nutcase. Depressed, schizophrenic, abused, I don't care. Why else would he shoot up a school?'

'He was depressed. That's enough for you? He was depressed.'

'Jesus Christ, Lucia, what does it matter? He's dead. He's not going to be doing it again.'

'We're talking about a shooting in a school, chief. In a school.'

'So we are. What's your point?'

Lucia could smell coffee on the chief inspector's breath. She could feel heat leaking through his pores. She tried moving her chair backwards once more but the legs snagged against the pile of the carpet. She got up. 'I'm going to let in some air.' She slid past her boss towards the window and reached through the blind to find the latch.

'It doesn't open. It's never opened.'

Lucia tried twisting the latch anyway but it had long since gummed itself shut. She turned and leant back against the sill. Her fingertips were sticky with grime.

'There's something you're not telling me.'

'No there isn't.'

'There is. There's something you're not telling me. Look, this guy, this Szajkowski Ð ' he pronounced it saj-cow-skee ' Ð no-one knew about him, right? He wasn't on any lists.'

'He wasn't on any lists.'

'So no-one messed up. No-one could have predicted it, which means no-one could have stopped it.'

'I suppose so.'

'So why won't you let this thing go?'

Lucia picked at the dirt on her fingers.

'These things happen, Lucia. Sometimes these things happen. It's shitty but it's life. Our job is to catch the bad guys. In this case, the bad guy's dead. All the rest Ð the accusations, the recriminations, the lessons fucking learnt Ð leave that to the politicians.'

'I want more time.'

'Why?'

'I need more time.'

'Then tell me why.'

It was one of those thick summer days when the sun seems to exhale over the city so that by the afternoon the whole of London is consumed by its hazy, sticky breath. Though the brightness had faded, the temperature if anything had increased. Lucia stuck out her lower lip and blew air across her brow. She tugged at the underarms of her blouse.

'What if there was more than one bad guy?' she said. 'What if not all of the bad guys are dead?'

'Five hundred people saw Szajkowski pull the trigger. You're not telling me that all of them are wrong.'

'No, I'm not. That's not what I'm saying. But you don't have to be the one to pull the trigger to deserve a portion of the blame.'

—from A Thousand Cuts