Their relationship was a strange one. Hanson had certainly never intended to get involved with Jason, and wasn’t aware that she’d ever flirted. A sudden invitation for a drink (which had come during the rather heightened emotions at the end of a case) had been accepted, and had turned into a series of drinks. She’d been very reluctant to let those drinks become something more, not least because she wasn’t sure how she felt about anything at the time.

But sometimes, Hanson had learned, you ended up falling into things without consciously choosing them. The drinks had turned into dinners, and then, a month after the first one, into going home together for the first time. And it was all … nice. Simple, normal, and worlds apart from her abusive relationship with Damian.

The only downside to it all was that she and Ben Lightman no longer seemed to be friends. Things had got suddenly awkward, and it was hard to get her head around given that she and Ben had no history.

There had, it was true, been a weird long hug a few hours before she’d gone for that first drink with Jason, an event that still made her feel embarrassed and strangely sad to think about. But that wasn’t really a reason for things to have turned sour, and she was at a loss to explain why everything had changed so quickly. Why she always resorted to false cheerfulness, and why he had become as distant and as detached from her as if they’d never been friends.

Step Conti lived not far from Jojo. He was on the edge of the New Forest, in West Wellow, which was a little less picturesque than Furzley. There were more blocky sixties structures, retirement bungalows and modern touches. The effects of lying just outside the boundary of the national park. Modernity had been allowed to creep in.

Step’s house, however, was on a lane that ran south-west out of the village into an open area of heathland. Houses lined one side of the tarmac, with unspoilt land on the other. Today, with a fall of snow over it all, it looked dazzling.

Jonah eased the Mondeo along the lane carefully, trying to stay on the road surface as he manoeuvred round parked cars. There were deep, snowy tyre tracks running down the side, and he had no desire to test out the car’s four-wheel drive just now.

Step’s house, right at the far end, had a new-looking wooden gate and a thickly gravelled drive. Someone had tied a pair of balloons to the gate, one pink and one blue. Jonah winced, thinking that a murdered friend was not the sort of news to be bringing to a kids’ party.

The gravel driveway held only a metallic red Qashqai and a bike rack with one small pink bike in it. Which hopefully meant they had arrived before the party had kicked off.