"Metropolitan Police. London," she adds, realizing she might need to specify even if the Met is the oldest continuously operating police force in the world. "I've been with the CID nearly twenty years," and that's less bragging and more just a statement of fact, although there might be a little bravado there.

Stella isn't yet sure how she feels about Sonny personally, but it's strangely reassuring to encounter someone here who shares her profession, who might have been a colleague in other circumstances. She finds there's a specific perspective to being a police officer that isn't easily understood by other people who don't do the work. That's insular, perhaps, but it's also true.

"I'm afraid we're rather short on investigative tools," she says. "It's not simple to try to keep track of what's going on here when we've hardly any paper or writing instruments."