Jonah noticed that someone had added an apostrophe after the final S of ‘Saints’ on the street sign, using some kind of sticker that was much larger than the rest of the typeface. He smiled slightly to himself. That kind of a street, then.

He hitched the car half up onto the pavement behind the scientific support van. Three emergency vehicles in total, and Hanson’s little Nissan parked further up. The cluster stood out, the only vehicles that were clean and free of snow. He was glad to shrug on his thick padded jacket and pull on ski gloves before he climbed out.

The garden to number eleven was bounded by trees. Snowy firs standing between leafless sycamore branches. At the front an overgrown hedge screened the ground floor from view. It looked like it would be gloomy in that front garden, even in daylight.

Approaching the gate, he struggled to make out much beyond the white forms of the forensics team and a nylon screen being manhandled into place halfway down the garden.

One of the overalled figures moved to meet him. Linda McCullough, forensic scientist for Southampton and the New Forest, and undisputed lead of the scene of crime team. He took a step forwards onto the clear plastic sheeting that had been rolled out from the front door up to the pavement.

‘Tell me,’ Jonah said.

‘We’ve only just arrived,’ McCullough told him, lowering her mask to speak to him. ‘Victim’s a young white male. The homeowner called it in. She told us she’d found him just before six thirty.’

Jonah saw that one of the figures was spooling a cable out of the front door, unwinding it towards a pair of wide-based portable floodlights. He couldn’t see much within the house. A lighted hallway. Stairs to one side.

‘Anyone else in the house?’

‘Your constable’s here, but nobody else.’

The floodlights burst into brilliant life, dousing the garden with light. He squinted against the sudden brightness, and then followed McCullough behind the screen they’d now erected on the grass.

A young man lay a few feet behind it, his white dragon-motif T-shirt dominated by a large crimson bloom. As McCullough involved herself in angling the lights, Jonah crouched down over the body. He gazed first at the colourless face. A chiselled, high-cheekboned face. It had been handsome, he thought, up until today.

He took in the powerful shoulders and lean abdomen, and a knife that lay close by, sticky with drying blood. Then his gaze travelled to the stained snow beneath the body.

‘Not much blood,’ he muttered.

McCullough gave an audible sigh as she lifted her mask back into place. ‘Sheens …’

‘All right, I know.’ He grinned at her, and straightened up. ‘You do your job, and I’ll go and make the coffee.’