Not him. Her rejection of Patel’s hypothesis was visceral, straight from the gut: Josh hadn’t killed Corinna, simple as. There were no triggers – Rin hadn’t been cheating or going to leave him, and yes, she would know. But beyond that, even if she had been planning to leave and she’d written a double-page spread about it in the Mail on Sunday, Josh wouldn’t have killed her. He just wouldn’t.

‘Your instincts tell you?’ Freshwater’s voice suddenly, lambent with scorn. ‘Do they?’ He’d been standing behind his desk, fists planted, knuckles white. His shirt strained in lines, neck to armpit, stuffed with mid-life-crisis muscle. Anger shimmered off him but his eyes had been gleaming, too: Gotcha. Here it was at last, the excuse he’d been waiting for. ‘So we’re ignoring the facts – the facts gathered by your team, DCI Lyons – and going with your instincts, instead. What the fuck …?’ His prissy fountain pen jumped in his prissy glass tray. He’d spun around, turning his back as if disgusted. Her instincts said he was hiding his face, trying not to whimper at the pain in his knuckles.

Instinct wasn’t ‘woo-woo woman shit’ – she couldn’t wait to talk about that at her appeal – as any cop worth his salt knew. ‘Read Malcolm Gladwell, you …’ Fuckwit – she’d stopped herself but barely. He’d got the message, though. The next day, she’d ordered him a copy of Blink on Amazon. She knew it had arrived; Gid said he’d seen it on his desk. Instinct was years of lived experience, years of watching people, their words, behaviour, body language, processed in a moment and delivered to your gut as guidance on what you were dealing with, so you could protect yourself. And her instinct told her that Corinna had never had to protect herself from Josh.

An hour ago, she’d lain with her eyes trained on the red digital numbers of the desk clock: 1.30 a.m. A full day since the emergency call, already half – half! – of the first forty-eight hours, the most valuable in a murder enquiry, when everything was freshest: scene, witnesses, investigators. With every hour that passed, the case became cooler, the odds of solving it longer.

Arson.

The lack of information was doing her head in. ‘Evidence of an accelerant’ – what did that mean? A jerry can dropped on the drive, or areas of petrol that had somehow failed to ignite? Was it petrol for the lawnmower, grabbed from the garage on the spur of the moment or had it been brought there, premeditated? Where was Corinna found – which room? Had she been dead before the fire started? If she was badly burned and any existing injuries had been soft-tissue … Veteran of hundreds of crime scenes, gangland executions, shootings, drownings, Robin had run to the bathroom and puked.