All of which came at a price. And when budgets were squeezed to the point of strangulation, bean counters made ruthless decisions about which categories of crime merited forensic intervention. Within those categories, there were very clear guidelines governing how much a Senior Investigating Officer could spend. If those guidelines were exceeded – and Paula had been involved in MIT cases where they had been smashed to smithereens in the interests of saving lives and nailing killers – the money had to be found elsewhere. So now a key part of any serious criminal investigation was weighing up how little they could get away with in terms of forensic expenditure. It was hardly satisfactory, in Paula’s opinion. But nobody in the budget team much cared what the troops on the front line thought.

So, for officers like Paula, who had learned her priorities from Carol Jordan, cultivating relationships with individual forensic scientists and crime-scene investigators had become as essential as developing what the acronym-obsessed hierarchy termed CHIS – Covert Human Intelligence Sources. What used to be called ‘snouts’. A CSI who was your friend could be persuaded to go the extra mile for you, to cut bureaucratic corners in processing crime-scene material, even to suggest what might be fruitful lines of inquiry and evidence-gathering. When you actually liked them, it was a bonus.

And Paula liked Dave Myers. They’d discovered early on that they shared the same tastes in music and comedy. Dave, ever the scientist, used to prepare monthly spreadsheets of upcoming gigs and email them to Paula. They’d spend half a dozen evenings a month in scuzzy pubs and crummy music venues sampling whatever took their fancy, occasionally branching out into bigger auditoriums when their favourites hit the big time. They’d kept up the habit for years, until eventually Dave married Becky and became a dad. Then Paula had teamed up with Elinor. Now they met up as a foursome every couple of months at a comedy club or a more salubrious music venue than in the old days. Dave no longer did the spreadsheets, but he still had the knack of picking good nights out.

‘King Creosote,’ he said now, crossing his lanky legs and leaning one elbow on the upper knee.

‘Definitely. Email me the date.’

‘It’s at the Methodist Central Hall, so you’ll have to smuggle in your own drink.’

‘Not a problem. OK, Nadia Wilkowa. Where are we up to?’