It didn’t take Jonah long to walk to the end of the close and back, and in an effort to keep moving he decided to go back up towards Belmont Road, too. Dawn was approaching rapidly, though the temperature was still well below zero. The sky towards Holly Hill was a warm orange that somehow slid into washed-out blue, and many of the houses had lights on, some showing anxious faces through the window. A whole street, summoned to watch by the flickering blue lights of the squad cars.

‘Has someone done her in?’

The voice rang out from a large white-washed house with red-tiled eaves and a protruding porch. A gravel drive led up to it in a sweep, bordered by clipped shrubs, many of them tied with twine.

It was a much older house than any of the others, probably by a good hundred years. Jonah wondered if the land the street was built on had once belonged to this house. It had the look of a small manor about it, with its tall windows and high roof.

The voice came from a figure standing in the porch. He was a man of somewhere between sixty and eighty. Corduroy trousers and a V-neck sweater over a checked shirt were finished off by sheepskin slippers.

Jonah gave him a flat look. ‘Sorry?’

‘I asked if someone had done her in.’ The slippers-wearer raised a slightly crooked finger to point towards the squad cars. ‘Wouldn’t be such a surprise, with that one.’ He nodded in what looked like satisfaction.

‘Why do you say that?’ Jonah kept his voice neutral. However distasteful comments like that were, they were often useful. Jonah’s was a world where every petty, mean-spirited remark was to be hoarded. To be treasured. To be written into his notebook and fed into the workings of the case in the hope that it might point them the right way.

‘Well, I’ve been half expecting it,’ the older man said. ‘The number of times I’ve seen her stagger out of a cab in the early hours, barely able to stand. The kind of woman who ends up a victim, don’t you think?’

Jonah nodded, almost but not quite as if he agreed. ‘Mrs Reakes is fine, luckily, but I’d be interested to know if you saw or heard anything unusual last night.’

‘Me? No.’ The man in the slippers shook his head. ‘Nothing unusual. The standard Friday-night drag race went on, but I don’t give them the time of day now.’

‘Drag race? You mean fast cars?’

‘Yes. The lovely lads who like to tear along Portswood Road and then down past the end of the close.’

‘So you heard them last night? What time would this have been?’

‘Oh, gone midnight,’ the gentleman said. And then he added, ‘If something’s happened, I’d say they were likely to have been involved.’