“I wouldn’t have come if I’d known who you meant. When you said you had a friend with specialist knowledge in ICT I was imagining, I don’t know, an office? Maybe a web designer, a computer engineer. I know Gideon Jones—and he knows me. I arrested him last year for a public order offence, along with a few other crusties who were staging a protest in the centre of town that got out of hand.”

“Oh, did you?” said Amy, brightly. “Well, never mind. He’s very forgiving. I’m sure he’ll have forgotten all about it.”

“I doubt that very much. I haven’t. He wasn’t terribly happy with me at the time. What makes you think he’s going to help us? Or anyway help me—a police officer? I’m pretty sure he was wearing a T-shirt that read Pigs are Scum.”

“He and I go back years. I’ve known him since university—I even lived here for a while in my second year.”

“I’m not sure, Amy. He tried to kick me in the face when we were putting him in the cells. I don’t think he’s my biggest fan.”

She leaned her head to one side, considering. “No, perhaps he’s not.” She opened the car door to step out. “But, he’d do anything for me, darling.”

As she got out of the car, a dark part of Harper thought, oh really, why? What is it that you do for him, or did do for him once? Her mind concocted a montage of beautiful Amy and wrinkled, crusty old Gideon, laughing together, kissing, worse. But then even as she thought it she knew the scenario was unlikely, or at any rate irrelevant: Harper herself would have done anything for Amy, and there’d never been anything more between them than a bit of light arm-linking.

The building was a once-proud Edwardian semi at the dead end of a wide street lined with mighty limes, the roots pushing up the pavement in ripening humps that swelled and cracked gently with each passing year. The trees were reclaiming the street: we are stronger, they said. Given time, we shall prevail. The trees and the high wall at the end of the road together blocked most of the light and formed a lush green cave, carpeted with a mulch of fallen vegetation, old and new. Houses here were well spaced, large and set back from the road with their own private driveways, but Gideon’s was not a drive you could pull into, crowded as it was with high grasses and wild shrubs that spilled from the borders, untamed.