Carrying herself now with a calm she believes could last her whole life, but which she knows from experience is strangely temporary, the Inspector enters a grimly merry concession on three floors, the first decked in patriotic bunting. It is only a few minutes from her front door. She walks past it on off days and loathes the frontage, the generic portcullis shirts and red letterbox purses, the saucy key rings with smirking bikini girls driving buses. Once, though, needing a properly vile London-flavoured gift for a colleague from Manchester, she had forced herself to go inside—ultimately emerging that time with Tower Bridge chocolates in a moulded plastic presentational tray—and seen the upper floor, full of slightly higher-quality guilt gifts for wives and neglected offspring. She picks her way between Dick Van Dyke postcards and the silver-plate letter openers. A girl in a company T-shirt beckons her forwards, smile fixed, and throws a polystyrene aeroplane in a loop around her head.