PC Carver nodded and made a note in his book.

Annie smiled up at him. “You never know. Sometimes these little things make all the difference. Let’s have a look.” She carried the wallet over to the table by the front window.

Gerry came back from upstairs in time to join the three of them. “Nothing,” she said. “Though there’s a mattress on the floor in each of the two bedrooms, and it looks as if someone’s been sleeping on one of them recently.”

Annie started to riffle through the wallet. It was certainly bare. “No driving license,” she said. “And no debit or credit or loyalty cards, either.”

“Judging by the state of his arm,” said Gerry, “it’s probably a good thing for all of us that he didn’t drive. I mean, you know, before he . . .”

“I know what you mean,” said Annie. “Aha. He’s got a senior’s bus pass here. Howard Stokes, age sixty-seven.”

Annie passed Gerry a scrap of paper she found stuck between two dirty five-pound notes, on which was scrawled something that resembled a mobile phone number. “Could be his dealer or someone?”

“I’ll check it out,” said Gerry. “Think it was an accident, guv?”

Annie peered at the body again. “No way of telling,” she said. “Not yet. Not until the doc gets him on the slab and the experts go over the scene. Who knows, even then? We’ll need to find out if he was right-handed, for a start. If he wasn’t, we may have another murder to deal with. We also need to know whether his prints are on the syringe, where he might have got the drugs from, and so on. Even if we think we’ve got all the answers, there’ll always be a chance that someone else injected him, wiped the syringe and made sure his fingerprints would be found on it. Vic Manson’s good with this sort of thing. Odds are he’ll be able to tell us by the angles and impressions whether Stokes would have handled the syringe in that way to get it where it is. I can’t see any evidence of it, but there’s also a chance he was killed in some other way and it was made to appear like a drug overdose. But who would want to go to that much trouble, I have no idea.”

“Should we call in the super?” Gerry asked.

Annie shook her head. “No need. Let him have his evening out. I’ll talk to the AC in a while and see what she says. You have a chat with Sean and Luke. In the meantime, I’ll call for the forensics team. We’ll wait here for Dr. Burns and the CSIs. We’ll get Peter Darby to take some stills and video, too. Then, when the doc’s finished, he can get the body wrapped up and transferred to the mortuary at Eastvale General ready for Karen tomorrow morning.”

“She’s got the boy from the wheelie bin slated for tomorrow,” said Gerry.