‘Stuie, OK if I come in?’

She waited for some moments, then closed the front door behind her. ‘Stuie?’

The silence made her uncomfortable.

‘Stuie? You OK?’

There was a handful of post on the floor. Ignoring it, she walked through into the kitchen-dining area and saw what looked like the remains of breakfast on the table. Stuie always left the kitchen immaculate in preparation, he told her, for the fish and chip restaurant he was starting with his brother.

‘Stuie?’ she called out again. ‘Stuie, it’s Denise!’ She peered out through the window at the small, neat rear garden but there was no sign of him out there.

She went through into the lounge. The television was on, the sound low, a presenter she vaguely recognized standing on a cliff in a stunningly scenic location, talking earnestly to camera about erosion.

She went out and stood at the foot of the stairs. ‘Stuie!’ she called out. ‘Stuie! Are you up there? It’s me, Denise!’

No response.

‘I’m coming upstairs, Stuie, is that OK?’

She waited, then climbed up the short steep staircase and stood on the landing. Three doors were closed and a fourth was slightly ajar. She called out his name yet again. And again, no response.

She pushed on the door that was ajar and peered in. Stuie, in a T-shirt and tracksuit bottoms, was curled up in a foetal position on the floor, beside the bed. The room looked like a bomb had detonated. A chair was upended and half the duvet was on the floor. The dressing-table mirror was smashed. One of the curtains had been pulled off and the rail hung down at a lopsided angle.

She ran across to Stuie and looked down. His hair, and the white rug on which his head lay, skewed sideways, were soaked with blood. There was blood on the walls and ceiling. His right arm was at a strange angle and his hand was covered in blood, too. She knelt and felt his wrist for a pulse.

Shaking, she stood up, backed away a few paces, looking wildly around, then pulled her phone out of her bag and dialled 999.

34

Thursday 9 May

It wasn’t since his more junior days that Roy Grace had been among the first to arrive at a murder scene. Mostly, as head of the Surrey and Sussex Major Crime Team, by the time he got there, the well-oiled machinery was well under way.

This was the case now, as he approached the modern, bland red-brick housing estate, across the road from a garage, on the outskirts of the historic cathedral city of Chichester. The familiar assortment of marked and unmarked police vehicles, the large, square CSI truck, the cordon of blue-and-white police tape, and the usual cluster of media, the curious and the ghouls gathered beyond it.