Detective Chief Inspector Eve Clay and Detective Sergeant Gina Riley followed Mr McGann, Amanda Winton’s ground floor neighbour, up the staircase to the third floor of a large Victorian terraced building on Princes Road. He stopped on the first landing, out of breath, clinging to the banister, his stained white vest and boxer shorts clinging to his flabby bulk.

‘Murdered?’ he wheezed.

‘Yes,’ said Clay. ‘How come you’ve got the key to her front door?’

‘The landlord pays me as caretaker, so I have the keys in case of an eventuality…’

‘I see you’re struggling. How about you hand the keys to me?’ Clay held her hand out.

‘Won’t argue with you…’

‘Go downstairs, gather your thoughts on what you know about Amanda Winton.’

Clay and Riley hurried up the remaining two sets of stairs, past the competing sounds of daytime TV and robotic dance music leaking from the separate flats. At the plain door of Amanda Winton’s top floor flat, as Clay slid the skeleton key into the lock she imagined how Pandora felt when she unlocked the forbidden box.

She turned the key and pushed the door open at the top right-hand corner with her index finger.

A narrow corridor led into the heart of the attic flat, with rooms on one side of the passageway.

‘Nothing in the bathroom.’ Riley checked to the left.

‘Nor the kitchen,’ confirmed Clay, inspecting the room ahead of it.

Clay stopped at the closed door of the main living space. On the door was a collage of pictures of the same woman, a slim blonde in her mid twenties; there was no sign of anyone else in the collage, just her.

‘They’re all selfies,’ said Clay, making a mental note of the smiles and the pouts that Amanda should have grown out of when she was in her late teens.

Carefully, she pushed the door with the merest touch and it swung back with a pronounced creak from the hinges. Clay reached around the wall and turned on the light.

A huge bunch of red roses sat in a vase next to Amanda’s double bed.

‘I wonder who sent them?’ said Clay.

Clay stepped into the cold attic room but felt something colder run down her spine, something alive, inhuman and wet.

She took a mental picture of the room, the modern ornaments, the colourful throws and Laura Ashley cushions, a single woman’s attempt to imprint a feminine, homely touch on a drab space.

Clay walked to the table at the centre of the room and looked at Amanda’s laptop, next to the photograph that The Ghoul had sent to Annie Boyd in his incarnation as Richard Ezra, gazing lovingly into the space where his wife had stood with him in reality.

She turned the picture over and quietly read the writing. Dear Mand-E, with love Thomas. Clay showed it to Riley. ‘Same picture, different pseudonym.’