“So have I, but there’s still no excuse. I don’t care if the guy was skint: self-respect is free. The Spains were just as broke as he was, and their gaff was spotless.” Even at my lowest, just after Laura and I split, I never left chunks of food to rot in my sink. “It’s hardly as if he was too busy to pick up a J cloth.”

Richie had got down to the sofa cushions; he pulled one out and ran his hand around the edges of the frame, in among the crumbs. “Twenty-four hours a day in this place, no job to go to, no money to go out: that’d have your head melted. Not sure I’d be arsed cleaning, either.”

“He wasn’t stuck here twenty-four-seven, remember. Conor still had places to go. He was a busy boy, out at Brianstown.”

Richie unzipped the cushion cover and slid a hand inside. “True enough,” he said. “And you know something? That’s why this place is a tip. It wasn’t his home. That hide on the estate, that was his home. And that was as clean as you like.”

We did the search right: undersides of drawers, backs of bookshelves, inside the boxes of out-of-date processed crap in the freezer—we even used Conor’s charger to plug Richie’s phone into every socket in the place, to make sure none of them was a dud hiding a cache spot. The paperwork box was going back to HQ with us, in case Conor had used an ATM two minutes after Jenny or kept a receipt for designing Pat’s company’s website, but we took a quick look just for kicks. His bank statements followed the same general depressing pattern as Pat and Jenny’s: a decent income and solid savings, then a smaller income and shrinking savings, then broke. Since Conor was self-employed, he had tanked less dramatically than Pat Spain—gradually the checks got smaller, the gaps between them got larger—but he had done it earlier. The slide had started in late 2007; by the middle of 2008, he had been dipping into his savings. It had been months since anything went into his account.

By half past two we were finishing up, putting stuff back where it belonged, which in this case meant rearranging it from our focused mess to Conor’s unfocused one. It had looked better our way.

I said, “You know what strikes me about this place?”

Richie was shoving books back onto the bookshelf by the handful, setting little eddies of dust swirling. “Yeah?”

“There’s no trace of anyone else in here. No girlfriend’s toothbrush, no photos of Conor with his mates, no birthday cards, no ‘Ring Dad’ or ‘8pm, meet Joe at the pub’ on the calendar: nothing that says Conor’s ever met another human being in his life.” I slid DVDs onto their rack. “Remember what I said about him having nothing to love?”

“Could be all digital. Loads of people our age, they keep everything on their phones, or on the computer—photos, appointments—” A book went down on the shelf with a flat bang and Richie whirled round to me, his mouth open, his hands going up to clasp the back of his head. “Shit,” he said. “Photos.”