A quick shave.

Through half-closed eyes, his own face in the mirror, staring back at him.

He tried to imagine the victim’s childhood, from hints given, evidence gathered.

It didn’t look good. What was it he’d said? Abnormal, by any modern standard. Was that it? You could say we were abused. Old-fashioned parents. All perfectly accepted, a way of life. Christ, but he wished he’d recorded that interview now. If he’d known …

What else? Think!

They liked to play mind games with us.

Yes. And something more. Something important …

The everyday cruelties.

That was it.

Everyday cruelties. A double meaning. Accepted cruelties. Or cruelties every day.

And somehow or other those cruelties were still being administered.

Hobbes drove to the police station through the quiet streets. It wasn’t an uncommon experience, waking up early and coming into work before the morning shift had properly arrived. The nick was more his home than anywhere else these days.

His desk was piled with forms to be signed, reports to be finished, bits of paper with memos written on them in someone else’s handwriting. He couldn’t read the notes.

His head was a cage. Thoughts were animals, birds, trapped there.

He was still in the dream in some way, still peering out through his half-closed eyes at the wall in front of him, one or two nightshift officers sitting at other desks, working quietly, ignoring him. Good. He needed time. He wanted to be alone. The wall board was blank. He used a black marker to write two words: THE DRESS. He stared at this for a moment. Far off, a clock was chiming: he checked his watch. Six. An hour or so before the team arrived. His eyes closed, his head bowed forward, and the fingers of one hand stretched out, to rub at both temples.

The dress. The blue dress, yellow flowers. No, not the flowers, not that, not the dress itself but something else, on the edge of memory, long ago, years. Damn it. The image flickered into view, and then away.

Mist. Fog. He couldn’t see forward …

When was that? 1961? ’62? Later, maybe. Why was he thinking of that? The last of the London pea-soupers. Smog. Yes, he remembered being on duty that day, barely seeing his hand in front of his face …

Hobbes sat down and pulled an evidence bag from a drawer. Within a few hours this would belong to Forensics, but for now it was his to examine. He pulled on a pair of thin plastic gloves, although he hardly knew why: the box and its contents had been buried deep inside concrete for so long. Still, someone had touched it since then – someone had placed it on the floor of the cellar. Probably Nicholas Graves. But wasn’t there an off-chance that the murderer had done it? And that one chance meant that Hobbes had to handle the material carefully; he mustn’t add his own traces.

Every contact leaves a trace. That was how they put it. Otherwise known in the trade as ‘Locard’s Principle of Exchange’. Jack Collingworth had taught him this, the DI who had taken Hobbes under his wing back in the sixties. Exchange, lad! Monsieur Locard got that spot on. Tit for tat. You just need to work it out. The perpetrator always leaves something behind at a crime scene, and they always take something away; there are no exceptions. The Old Conundrum, in Collingworth’s words. To wit, lad: a strand of the victim’s hair snagged on the killer’s clothing, in exchange for a scraping of the killer’s flesh under the victim’s fingernails. No, not ‘killer’: Jack always used the word bastard for any male perpetrator. The bastard’s flesh. And there it was, the pure equation: a flow of give and take across the borderline where life and death merged as one. You just have to work it out properly, that’s all, lad. And the bastard’s done for!