“No. He must have taken Bradford by surprise, though.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because he was a pretty tough customer himself. I wouldn’t have fancied tackling him. Way it looks is the burglar must have heard him coming and hid behind the door, then bashed the back of Bradford’s head in with a cosh of some kind.”

“You never found a weapon?”

“No.”

“No clues? No prints?”

“Nothing usable.”

“No witnesses?”

“None that we could find.”

“What was taken?”

“Wallet, a few knickknacks, by the looks of it. Place was a bit of a mess.”

“Did it appear as if someone had been looking for something?”

“I never really thought about that. As I say, though, it was a mess. Turned upside down. Why the sudden interest?”

Michelle told him a little bit about Graham Marshall.

“Yes, I’ve read about that. Terrible business. I hadn’t realized there was a connection.”

“Was Bradford married?”

“No. He lived alone.”

Michelle could sense him pause, as if he was going to add something. “What?” she asked.

“Oh, it’s nothing. Bit of a laugh, really.”

“Tell me anyway.”

“Well, afterward, you know, we had to have a look around the house and we found…well…at the time it seemed quite risqué, though by today’s standards…”

Out with it, man, Michelle found herself thinking. What are you talking about?

“What was it?” she asked.

“Pornographic magazines. A bundle of them. And some blue films. I won’t go into detail, but they covered quite the range of perversions.”

Michelle found herself gripping the receiver tighter. “Including pedophilia?”

“Well, there were some pretty young-looking models involved, I can tell you that. Male and female. Not kiddie-porn, though, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

Michelle supposed there was a distinction to be made. In some ways, once you had pubic hair, breasts and all the rest, you didn’t qualify as “kiddie-porn,” but you still might only be fourteen years old. Gray area.

“What happened to all this stuff?”

“Destroyed.”

But not before you and your lads had a good look at it, I’ll bet, Michelle thought.

“We didn’t let anything slip at the time,” he went on, “because it didn’t seem…well, the bloke had just been killed, after all. There seemed no point in blackening his name with that sort of thing.”

“Understandable,” said Michelle. “Who claimed the body?”

“Nobody. Mr. Bradford had no immediate family. The local authorities took care of everything.”

“Thank you, Mr. Scholes,” she said. “You’ve been a great help.”

“Think nothing of it.”

Michelle hung up and nibbled the end of her pencil as she thought about what she’d heard. She hadn’t come to any conclusions yet, but she had a lot to discuss with Banks when he arrived.

PC Flaherty, who had tracked down the mystery girl’s address, had been asking around Eastvale College, thinking that a girl who looked like she did must be a student. As it turned out, she wasn’t, but her boyfriend was, and one of the people he spoke to remembered seeing her at a college dance. The boyfriend’s name was Ryan Milne and the girl was known as Elizabeth Palmer. They lived together in a flat above a hat shop on South Market Street, the direction in which Luke Armitage had been walking when he was last seen.