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customs, helping him to open up a network of customers for his merchandise. The African was in custody now, still trying to convince the police that his name was Johnny Brown and that he held a British passport. They’d searched him and found he was carrying a key fob with the Tanzanian national flag on it and that the T-shirt he was wearing was by a Tanzanian manufacturer, so MCIU was combing records from Dar Es Salaam to get a hit on him.
    ‘What’s all this?’ Superintendent Rolf Powers, the head of MCIU, opened the door at ten past nine. ‘No lights? It’s like my teenage son’s bedroom in here.’ He switched on the fluorescents. ‘Where were you? I’ve just done a whole press conference on the Kitson case without you.’
    Caffery froze the DVD and rotated the monitor to face the superintendent. ‘Look at this.’
    Powers did so. Frowned. ‘That’s Operation Norway. We’ve finished with that. The files should be with the prosecution service by the end of the month.’
    ‘Watch this.’ Caffery tapped the screen. ‘It’s important.’
    Powers closed the door and came in. He was tall, wide and well dressed, and must have been athletic once. The lifestyle had taken its toll, though, and his body was spreading around the middle, the neck. He put the wallet he was holding on the desk and pulled the chair up to the screen.
    The freeze frame of Dundas alone in the room before the attack showed another shape, standing close to Dundas’s head, its back to the camera. It was bent over, concentrating on doing something. After the arrests, when they’d got Dundas’s head to the morgue and examined it, they’d discovered that clumps of his hair were missing. In the same place on which the figure in the video was concentrating now.
    Powers shook his head. ‘It’s the Tanzanian, Johnny Brown, or whatever he’s really called. The one we’ve got in the bin.’
    ‘It’s not him. He’s lying.’
    ‘Jack, the little shit’s ’fessed to it about a thousand times. Straight cough – said he cut Dundas’s hair, wanted to make some voodoo bracelet with it. And if it’s not him, then who the hell is it? The support group emptied that place out, raked the place clean. There was no one. And no way out.’
    Caffery stared at the shape on screen. No one who’d seen the video had ever stated the obvious: that the figure on the screen didn’t look quite human. ‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s not him. I had the guys in the custody suite measure him. He’s five four. Short, but not this short. The camera was set at exactly one metre fifty high and was two metres from the table. I’ve looked at the CSI plans. Johnny Brown would have stood here.’ He pointed at a place on the screen. ‘More than a head taller. And look at those shoulders. There’s something wrong there, seriously wrong.’
    ‘They dressed him up – he admitted it. They sent him out to scare people into buying their voodoo crap. Pretty crude beliefs, these people have – not that those exact words ever came out of my mouth, of course.’
    Caffery stared at him stonily. ‘How’d they “dress” someone up to look like that? Look at it.’
    ‘Prosthetics. Lighting.’
    ‘There weren’t any prosthetics when we searched the place. And Brown didn’t have Dundas’s hair on him when they took him in, did he?’
    ‘Says he tossed it. And call me slow, call me a woollie, or however you Met people refer to us, but out here in the boonies someone ’fesses up to something like that, we kind of find it easier just to go ahead and believe him. No.’ His voice was suddenly efficient. ‘No, Jack. Let’s pretend we haven’t had this conversation. Operation Norway is over, OK?’ He stood. Pushed the wallet he was carrying across the desk to Caffery. ‘This is where the chief wants our time spent. This is the case I’m taking the beta-blockers for now. Open it.’
    Caffery did. It contained six eight-by-ten glossies. Photos of clothing laid out next to a