Inside the house it was almost as cold as in the street, and this was a damp cold that clawed into his bones. In the living room he switched on the light and the gas fire and saw the room as if for the first time. Soulless. This place is soulless.

It had the same patterned carpet that had been in the place when he’d bought it, a mock-leather sofa and a glass-topped coffee table. A television.

I’ve worked my bollocks off for fifty years and this is all I have to show for it.

And a decent boat, he thought, and at least that notion gave him a brief moment of comfort. The Lucy-May had been worth fighting for, and Deborah hadn’t got her hands on that. He switched on the set, thinking he would catch the late local news. Still standing in his coat, he found that the earlier memories were spinning round his head again: fractured light on the water, bouncing onto the face of a young woman laughing. The warm planks of the deck on his back, and terns overhead weaving weird shapes in the sky. Then the whiplash sound of snapping wood and the gunshots of sparks as the fire took hold.

As he waited for the news to come on, Malcolm shook his head to dispel the pictures that crowded his head, and went to the window to shut the curtains. It came to him that he would never again see Margaret Krukowski walk down Harbour Street on her way to church or the Metro, her back straight and her eyes fixed ahead. Her mind full of charity and good works. She could make no more demands. He wasn’t sure whether the thought pleased or dismayed him.

Chapter Nine

They stood outside on the pavement. Vera stamped her feet. An attempt to keep warm, but also to wake herself up.

‘What shall we do now?’ Holly would never be the first one to call it a day. Her working life was spent persuading her colleagues that she was less of a wimp than the rest of them. ‘Do you want to try this hostel?’

‘Nah,’ Vera said. ‘We’ll go tomorrow when the weather’s better.’

‘Well then?’ Patience had never been one of Holly Clarke’s virtues.

‘Get off home,’ Vera said. ‘You live in town, don’t you? The roads should be okay. Briefing in the morning, eight o’clock sharp. Paul Keating is planning the post-mortem at ten.’

‘What will you do?’ More curiosity than concern. The whole team thought she was mad to live in her father’s house at the top of a hill, regularly cut off by snow and floods.

‘Ah, don’t worry about me, Hol. I’ll find a bed for the night.’