The desk occupied the wall nearest the house, and had windows on two sides that presumably gave quite a bit of light during the day. Perched on top were a desktop computer and a freestanding webcam with a tripod. It was pointed towards the centre of the shed.

‘Did he edit his videos in here, too?’ Jonah asked, glancing at the desktop. It was cold enough in the studio that his breath fogged in the air, strikingly lit by the two overhead lights.

‘Yes,’ Issa said.

‘Would you be happy for us to look through the hard drive?’ Hanson asked, with a sympathetic smile.

‘I don’t … mind.’ Issa gave a tearful shrug. ‘But why do you want to?’

‘His YouTube videos often include mentions of what he’s been doing that day, or is planning on doing later,’ she explained. ‘They also show some of his clients. Though the ones with them in are normally filmed at a public gym, I think?’

‘It’s the SimpleGym,’ Issa told her. ‘When he goes, he takes the camera with him and plugs in his laptop. You might need to look on there for anything recent.’ His gaze wandered, and then came to rest on Hanson again. ‘Do you think this wasn’t random, then? That it was someone he knew?’

Jonah nodded to Hanson, a sign that he would take over again. It was only fair that he should be the one to break the news to Alex’s husband.

‘It seems that Alex didn’t die in the garden, as we at first thought,’ he said. ‘He was inside when he died, and his body was removed to the garden to mislead our team.’

Issa’s mouth moved, an involuntary twitch. ‘What was he doing there?’

‘We don’t know, but it’s clear that he died in bed. The woman who lived there with her husband was with him, though we don’t know in what capacity.’

Issa turned his head away, and the twitching of his mouth became a chewing on his lip that looked hard enough to hurt.

‘Would you have any reason to expect Alex to have been in bed with a woman?’

Issa’s voice was half choked as he said, ‘He’s done it before.’

16

Louise

I hid my gradual slide down the slope of alcoholism for some while. I would save it for when you were away. I’d get obliterated, and then set alarms for myself that went off at seven in the morning, just so I could send you a cheery message proving I was up and at ’em. The irony being that you, in most cases, were hungover as anything following conference dinners or client piss-ups. That didn’t count, did it? You didn’t have previous form for terrible drunken behaviour.