He felt slightly frustrated, too, that he had no clear picture of how all this might hang together. Louise’s attack might tie in with Alex being stabbed somewhere other than Saints Close. But if Niall Reakes had attacked them, how had they both ended up at the house?

He felt an urge to get out of the station. To do some active investigation. But there was nothing specific for him to follow up on.

The phone on O’Malley’s desk rang, and Jonah was still trying to work out his own next move while O’Malley answered it. He saw his sergeant wince slightly at what was obviously a tirade. Though as Jonah watched, his expression changed from long-suffering to alert.

‘I’m very sorry to hear that, Mr Derbyshire,’ he said, after a few moments. ‘We’ll get someone out to take a look.’

He hung up and said to Jonah, ‘That was one of the residents of Saints Close. He wants to know when someone’s going to come and clear up all the blood.’

‘The blood?’ Jonah said, blankly.

‘Apparently, now the snow’s melted, you can see pools of it all the way down the road.’

‘I’m so sorry.’

It must have been the tenth time Hanson had said it. Each time she intended for it to be the end of the tears. But they kept on oozing out, as Ben gently persuaded her to swap seats so he could drive, and then pulled the car in at the drive-to Starbucks so he could pick up tea. He let her sit in the passenger seat to try to compose herself while he went to buy it, but nothing had changed by the time he got back. And it was still the same after several scalding mouthfuls of Earl Grey.

‘There’s nothing to be sorry about,’ he told her again. And then he said, ‘You don’t have to tell me anything, but it might genuinely help.’

She would have kept on resisting if everything hadn’t felt so terrible.

She handed Lightman the phone and let him read for himself all the horrendous things Jason now thought about her.

I bumped into your ex, a man I didn’t even know about. A man you were still seeing up until last week …

She tried to swallow down the tears along with another mouthful of tea while he read. It took Lightman a good thirty seconds to finish reading. She wondered if Ben would take it all at face value, too, and it made her feel desolate.

Damian had even woven Ben into his lies, a fact that added its own extra turn of total humiliation.

He told me that you’d been making moves on another colleague too, and bragging about it to your female friends because he was good eye candy. I assume he meant Ben Lightman, and I only hope he realises what he’s letting himself in for.