Niall was none of those things. At least not now. And that thought made her feel even worse.

She sighed, minimised the text, and pressed the call button. She rubbed at her right temple as the phone rang. She should have asked for paracetamol. No. Not for paracetamol. For codeine. Morphine. Something strong enough to knock her out until everything had somehow improved.

‘Hey sweetie! How’s it going?’ Niall asked, over background noises of people talking. Presumably he was still at the conference, and she’d caught him in a gap between meetings. She almost wished she hadn’t.

‘Fine,’ she said, automatically, and then corrected herself. ‘Well … not really fine. There was … Someone was killed right outside the house. I found them this morning.’

There was a silence, and then Niall asked, ‘Are you serious?’

‘Yes. Sorry.’ Louise gave a short laugh. ‘I wish I wasn’t.’

‘Killed how?’

‘Stabbed,’ she said. ‘In the stomach.’

‘Who – what, a teenager?’

‘A bit older, I think. He looked quite big.’

There was another silence, and she felt her heart rate speed up as he asked, ‘So just … some stranger? Not someone you know?’

The post mortem of Alex Plaskitt was uncomplicated, but it left Jonah feeling sombre. He and Lightman had watched Shaw’s initial examination of the knife, and listened to his quiet voice describing the three-inch, slightly tapered blade. He’d noted that it had a decorated metallic grip. This was not a utensil, but a weapon, and one that almost certainly had a sheath that had not yet been recovered.

‘McCullough’s putting us in touch with a weapons specialist she knows,’ Jonah told Shaw. ‘We may get something useful back from him.’

The pathologist moved on to look at the hands, which showed bruising on the knuckles, but no abrasions.

‘Would you still say they were defensive wounds?’ Jonah asked.

‘They could be, but they could equally well have happened a little earlier in the evening,’ Shaw said. ‘Slight swelling and visible bruising has begun to appear, which would have taken at least some minutes. But then he would have taken some minutes to die.’

Shaw moved to look at the knife wound and surrounding tissue. Removing organs in turn, he explained the damage to the upper part of the large intestine and the splenic artery.

‘The entry wound has cut the wall of the large intestine just below the stomach. However, it slid fairly neatly between the spleen and stomach above.’ He lifted an elastic pinkish-grey strand. ‘The damage to the splenic artery, which is what almost certainly caused his death, happened when the knife was removed.’

‘You’re sure?’ Jonah asked.

The pathologist gave a small smile. ‘I always am.’

It took Jonah a moment to get the joke: that he was always Shaw.