Political posters clung to the lampposts. None of the stained and rusty cars half up on the pavement among the wastepaper and dogshit were less than ten years old. Kearney knocked at Sprake’s door, once, twice, then a third time. He stepped back and with the rain falling into his eyes called up at the front of the building. “Sprake? Valentine?” His voice echoed off down the street. After a minute something drew his attention to one of the top-floor windows. He craned his neck to look, but all he could see was a piece of grey net curtain and the reflection of the streetlight on the dirty glass.

Kearney put his hand out to the door. It swung inward, as if in response. Kearney stepped back suddenly.

“Jesus!” he said. “Jesus!”

For a moment he had thought he saw a face peering round the door at him. It was smeared with streetlight, lower than you would expect to see a face, as if quite a young child had been sent to answer his knock.

Inside, nothing had changed. Nothing had changed since the 1970s, and nothing ever would. The walls were papered a yellowish colour like the soles of feet. Low-wattage bulbs on timers allowed you twenty seconds of light before they plunged the stairs back into darkness. There was a smell of gas outside the bathroom, stale boiled food from the second floor rooms. Then aniseed everywhere, coating the membranes of the nose. Near the top of the stairwell a skylight let in the angry orange glare of the London night.

Valentine Sprake lay under a wash of fluorescent light, inside a chalk circle drawn on the bare floorboards of one of the upper rooms. He was sprawled up against an armchair, his head thrown back and to one side, as if he was at that moment being shot. He was naked, and he seemed to have covered himself with some sort of oil. It glistened in the sparse ginger hair between his legs. His mouth had fallen open, and the expression on his face was at once pained and restful. He was dead. His sister Alice sat on a broken sofa outside the circle, her legs out in front of her. Kearney remembered her in adolescence, slow-moving and vague. She had grown into a tall woman of thirty or so, with black hair, very white skin, and a faint downy moustache. Her skirt was drawn up to reveal white, fleshy thighs, and she was staring across Sprake’s head at a picture on the opposite wall. From this strange cheap piece of religious art, a Gethsemane rendered stereoscopically in greens and bluish greys, the face and upper body of Christ yearned out into the room in a wrenched but determined gesture of embrace.

“Alice?” said Kearney.

Alice Sprake made a noise like “Yoiy. Yoiy yoiy.”

Kearney held his hand over his mouth and went a little further into the room.

“Alice, what happened here?”