She stands up, stretching out her aching back. Not for the first time, she doubts whether they’re going to get anything useful out of this fetid pile. She thinks about the results from Steph, and how Trevor Stevens demolished Robin’s life in the same way that Amy has ruined hers.

Robin sees her stop and pauses.

‘You okay?’ he asks.

‘Yeah, just… Who was that guy?’ she asks him, after a moment. ‘The one that came to see you in the police station last week?’

He pulls the mask down from his mouth for a moment and pauses, one foot scuffing in the mess on the floor. ‘Liam,’ he says at last. ‘My brother-in-law. It was the anniversary of their death last Thursday.’

‘And you’ve fallen out?’

‘Yes.’

‘How come?’

He frowns, and Freya wonders if she’s overstepped the mark. Then he speaks, his voice quiet, barely more than a whisper: ‘I don’t understand why he’s not more angry than he is.’

Freya remembers the callous words from the PCs, back when they found the hidden cameras. Like shut down… he wasn’t the same. She wonders if it could happen to her. Maybe it has already. Would she be the same person if she fell in love again, now she has lost Jon?

‘Perhaps he is angry,’ Freya says. ‘Just expresses it differently.’

‘Or perhaps he changed, and I didn’t.’

‘In what way?’

He sighs and shakes his head solemnly. ‘Maybe I was always this much of a miserable bastard, but I was too busy to notice.’

It’s a strange place for them to have a heart-to-heart. Both standing in white crime scene suits, a heap of stinking rubbish between them. She desperately wants to comfort him, but has no idea how.

‘You’re not—’ she begins, but he interrupts her.

‘Come on,’ he says, putting the mask back over his mouth. ‘Let’s get this done.’

Freya takes the hint, conversation over, and bends down again to the last bin liner. She assumes the bags Robin opened first were the oldest, because when they get to this last one, it somehow doesn’t smell as bad as the others.

Robin helps her lay out a new sheet of brown paper, and they open up the black bag fully, pushing everything out. Robin moves the rubbish around while she photographs the contents. There’s the coffee again, but there’s something else permeating the detritus. It’s a smoky, charred smell, like old barbecues.

She wrinkles her nose.

‘Anything?’ Robin asks. She can only make out a small portion of his face above the mask, the black and red swelling still growing above his left eye.

‘No, nothing.’ She crouches down and pokes in the waste. Potato peelings, the plastic box from something, maybe a punnet of strawberries. More indescribable mess. Internally she hopes nobody ever digs around in her rubbish; god knows what they’d find.

‘Freya.’