I wish you could speak, Sitting Bull, thought Clay. And those blind and unblinking eyes of yours could see.

She smiled briefly at the memory of a warm day last spring when she and Thomas had helped Philip to climb up Sitting Bull’s back, how intoxicated with happiness her son had been and how bleakly anxious she had felt, fearing in case he fell down on to the concrete below.

Clay heard a tapping at the window and snapped back into the moment. She opened the window and weighed up the constables: PC Wendy White, late thirties, a Teflon veteran, and PC Thomas Ruddock, early twenties, rattled by what he’d seen, gazing at Clay as if she were some mythical creature.

‘Get yourselves into the back please. And thank you for what you’ve done here.’

As they settled into the back of Clay’s car, they brought in the coldness of the morning, and Clay hit the overhead light to dispel the bleakness of the new day.

She turned, looking each of them directly in the eyes as she introduced herself.

‘I’m DCI Eve Clay…’

‘I know, I know you are,’ said PC Ruddock. ‘And can I just say…’

‘All right, Tom,’ said PC White. ‘Listening time.’

‘Thank you, PC White,’ said Clay, drinking in the hint of a smile in the female constable’s steely eyes. ‘I’ll begin with you, PC White. And then I’ll ask you questions, PC Ruddock. OK?’

‘That’s good,’ said PC White.

‘Wendy. Please go right back to the beginning of what happened. Tell me everything.’

‘We were patrolling Riverside Drive from midnight onwards. There’s been a spate of burglaries on the houses across the way from the Festival Gardens, thieves breaking into houses through the early hours. That was our brief,’ said PC White. ‘Stop any cars and pedestrians heading away from the estate.

‘We were driving back from the tip at the bottom of Jericho Lane for the umpteenth time when a call came through from switchboard. There’d been a call from a man on Otterspool Promenade around the Mersey Road area. He said he thought he’d seen a dead body in the river close to Sitting Bull.

‘I turned the car round and high-tailed it to the location. I had to come off road and across the grass and down the straight narrow path leading to the prom.

‘We went up and down from the gate at the Cressington Promenade end to the path leading up to the Otterspool pub. There was no sign of anyone. We slowed right down and used the headlights to look for blood but there wasn’t a drop on the concrete. I was convinced it was a hoax call and, in my own head, I worked out it had come from the Riverside Drive burglars, pulling us away from their turf.