“No, no, no, shit!” he cried, driving a shoulder at the door. Once. Twice. It was a heavy composite thing, the hinges brand new and solid. The door shrugged him off. Ignored him. Laughed in his face.

“What are you doing?” barked a voice from the adjoining garden. A middle-aged man stood there, peering out through a gap in his front door. A woman—presumably his wife—stood behind him, trying to simultaneously see what was going on, and not be seen herself. “Piss off and leave her alone, before I call the police.”

“Tell them Detective Sergeant Hamza Khaled needs assistance,” Hamza spat back. He grabbed one of the stones from the rockery and took aim at the glass panel that ran up the full height of the door. “And tell them to send an ambulance.”

He launched the stone and it connected hard with its target. The outer layer of glass fragmented, but stayed in the frame.

“Don’t just stand there!” Hamza ordered. “Go!”

He didn’t wait for the neighbours to scramble inside before grabbing a larger rock and swinging it with both hands. He held it this time, driving it against the glass like a hammer.

Bang. Bang. Ban—

The interior pane broke, and the glass spilled inward into the hallway. Thrusting an arm inside, Hamza felt around the door handle, found a key in the lock, and twisted.

He threw the door open, and grabbed at the feet that swung there in front of him, taking the weight off the knotted sheets that were around her neck, hoping that by some miracle he wasn’t too late. That somehow, he’d arrived just in the nick of time.

But the colour of her face and hands, and the smell of her bodily fluids knocked any such notions out of him.

With a cry of frustration, he stepped back, surrendering her to the sheets once more. The uppermost railing of the bannister creaked as it took her full weight again. She swung, her body inching left and right less than three feet from the floor.

Her hands were untied. There was no sign of a struggle, besides a toppled kitchen chair she must’ve stood on, then kicked away.

Down among the fragments of glass, close to where she hung, lay a six-by-four inch rectangle of white paper. Hamza ran back to his car, fished a pair of rubber gloves from the box in his glove compartment, and was heading back up the path when the next-door neighbours emerged, the husband holding the phone like it was some sort of deadly weapon.

“Police or not, you can’t just go breaking people’s windows,” the man said. “You need a whatchamacallit?”

“Warrant,” said his wife.

“You need a warrant.”

“Did you call it in?” Hamza asked. There was less urgency now, of course. None, almost.

“How are we supposed to know that you’re really who you say you are? You could be—”