“Sorry,” Sally corrected herself. “We initially thought that the body could be that of a vagrant unlucky enough to have set fire to themselves after lighting candles to keep warm. There’s no electricity in the cottage, and we found several tea lights scattered around the lounge—on the mantelpiece and in the hearth—but when I looked more closely at the debris on the floor directly next to the sofa, it looked like the furniture had been piled up around him. I mean, around the body.”

“So, the body was there first?”

“That’s for you to decide, Martin.”

“Accelerant?”

“Undetermined as yet.”

Prescott was disappointed when the video footage ended.

“That all you got?”

Sally started to play a second video, which began by showing the iron bed frame sitting squarely astride the sofa. Prescott closed his eyes and sighed heavily at the sight of his crime scene buried under a double bed. The quiet breath he exhaled formed the words “Fuck me!”

Prescott took a moment to gather his thoughts. When he was thinking, his eyes flicked from side to side as though he were seeing the various scenarios flashing past inside his head. He appeared to be a very laid-back man, but there was an intensity bubbling away underneath the surface. Mildly dyslexic, soon after joining the force he had made the decision never to write anything down in public. Instead, he’d decided he would remember everything, and in a brain that full, it could sometimes take a little longer to process what he was seeing. Although he hid his intellect under Northern glibness, Prescott was a clever man, and it was always worth waiting for him.

“Right, well, you know the rules, Sal. It’s a suspicious death, so I have to assume murder till the evidence tells me otherwise.” He walked away from Sally before she could reply and headed for the cottage to see if he could at least peek in through where the window had once been. “And if it’s murder, then I’m wasting valuable time standing out here doing naff all!”

Sally raced ahead and stood in his way, forcing him to stop.

“This may be your crime scene, DI Prescott, but you are not going in until I say it’s safe for you to do so.”

Prescott looked down at Sally. She was at least four inches shorter than him, but she was a feisty woman and she wasn’t going to back down.

“And anyway,” Sally added, “I hadn’t finished.”

She fast-forwarded the second video, stopping it at seven minutes and thirty-two seconds. On the wall above the hearth the word PERVERT could be seen scrawled in red paint. It was mostly covered in a thick layer of black soot, but the letters could still just be made out.

“It looks like you could have a dead sex offender. And I doubt he got here on his own.”

Prescott got his vape out of his left-hand jacket pocket.

“I know that should make me feel better about having to wait to gain access to me crime scene, but it just annoys me more. I don’t know if that word relates to this dead body or not, do I? So now I’m more frustrated than before you showed me.” He dragged on the vape, but couldn’t for the life of him get it to work. He put it back into his pocket and, from the other jacket pocket, got out a packet of cigarettes and a lighter. “You follow your rules and get that place scaffolded up asap and I’ll be over there shortening me life.”