The waiter holds the chair out for Steph and she sits. Robin notices she’s made an effort too – her hair is shiny and down round her shoulders, and she is wearing a dress, rather than her standard after-work uniform of jeans and a top. She looks nice, and he tells her so.

‘Just nice?’ she says, teasing him.

‘Better than nice. Beautiful.’ This stuff doesn’t come easy to Robin, and he finds himself stuttering over the words. He stares at the menu in his hands – thick white card, small black printed lettering. Like the rest of the restaurant, it’s simple, clean and elegant. The lighting is low, the music gentle and muted. The waiters move effortlessly around, their voices no more than a low murmur.

They order. He can’t resist the steak; she has something vegetarian. He asks about her day and she tells him about a post-mortem completed on a body fished out of a river. Neither baulks at such a disgusting conversation while they eat, and Robin thinks, this can’t be normal.

The conversation turns to Jonathan Miller. It is inevitable, a shared interest, and work being the only thing going on in Robin’s life.

‘And Baker’s letting you use uniforms for the search?’

Robin nods through a mouthful of steak. It was a hard sell for Baker to allocate more resources. But he accepted that leaving his DS and a DC to do a full recon of a house alone was going to take for ever. ‘First thing tomorrow,’ Robin replies.

‘I can’t believe she agreed to it. I wouldn’t let police anywhere near my house without a warrant.’

‘But you’re part of this world. She’s not suspicious.’

Steph points a fork at him. ‘Are you sure she’s not completely innocent?’

‘I don’t know, Steph. I don’t. If she did do it, I have no idea how. She has an alibi for him arriving at the hotel. She was miles away when he died.’

‘So maybe she didn’t do anything?’ Steph repeats. ‘Someone else was complicit?’

‘But who?’ Robin shakes his head. ‘The best friend’s alibi checks out, and we still haven’t found the mistress. Did you get any further with narrowing down the time of death?’

Steph looks apologetic. ‘No, and I don’t think we’re going to.’ She starts to explain in the face of Robin’s grumpy expression: ‘We use a lot of factors to estimate TOD – changes in muscle tone, stage of rigor mortis, level of decomp—’ she counts them off on her fingers ‘—and these can all be utterly unreliable. Body temp is the only one that’s vaguely useful, and that’s still subject to problems such as clothing and temperature of the room.’

Robin remembers the chill in the hotel room that day. ‘So what did you conclude for Jonathan Miller?’