‘No, April,’ Louise said, with a rush of horror. She tried to be firm. ‘I really don’t want to see him. And anyway, there won’t be any of that. I’m in this … non-situation with Niall, I’m still shaken as hell over someone assaulting me, however little I can remember, and … and the rest. We’re not going to do any setting up. Not for a long, long time, all right?’

April tutted. ‘If you say so.’ She sat back a little. ‘But I bet he won’t even remember that whole kissing and running thing. It’ll be like you just met.’

‘Well, here’s to almost having put a case together,’ O’Malley said, raising his glass of tonic a little unsteadily. It was wonderful to Hanson how he could simulate drunkenness with the rest of them without ever touching a drop. He told her that he never consciously modified his behaviour. He just got drunk on their drunkenness.

‘Ugh, thanks,’ Hanson said, lifting her glass. ‘I just spent five hours today trying to prove that Alex Plaskitt had the knife in time to kill a young woman in London, and I can’t seem to do it. She’s the one person we still don’t have a DNA match for, but I’m so sure it was him. The Viagra. The way she looked.’ She sighed. ‘He didn’t order two knives at once, and the only order that’s anywhere nearby was made after she was killed. And given a similar weapon was used, I may have to accept that he didn’t do it, even though every other thing fits.’

‘But he didn’t have that knife on the night of January the nineteenth, either,’ Lightman pointed out, ‘as he’d given it to Step. We’re positive he was the person who attacked Gianetta Jilani. She specifically mentioned a knife. Maybe he was using something else for quite some while, but eventually decided he wanted something more like Step’s artistic one from Steel and Silver.’

Hanson hesitated for a moment. ‘Yeah, or … or what if he took it off Step on the nineteenth? Offered to look after it and then used it, cleaned it and returned it?’

She put her glass down onto the table, quickly, and pulled her phone out of her pocket.

‘Um … It is Friday night, you know,’ O’Malley said. ‘You’re not actually supposed to be working.’

‘It’ll only take a second,’ Hanson said, grinning.

She took her phone out of the warm pub and into the cold street. It was another arctic night, and there was a sharp, all-penetrating wind tearing down Shirley Road. She regretted leaving her coat on the padded bench inside but made the call anyway.