Jerry Johnson was one of the later type of non-Londoner, born in Finchley in 1940 by the grace of God and died in a bungalow on the outskirts of Norwich with his penis bitten off. That last detail explaining why me and the scariest police officer in the Met, her beard, and two motorcycle outriders were doing a steady ton plus change up the M11. It was two in the morning as we came off the motorway so we filtered onto the A-road almost without slowing down. We reached the crime scene in under ninety minutes, which was impressive, only to find the Norfolk Constabulary had already taken the body away, which was not. Stephanopoulis stamped off with DCI Thompson to bite chunks out of the local plod, which left me to sidle up to the crime scene on my own.

“No sign of forced entry,” said DC Trollope.

Contrary to my dad’s prejudices the local plod were neither stupid nor noticeably inbred. If the kissing cousins of Norwich were getting it on then at least their offspring weren’t joining the police. Instead DC David Trollope was the kind of sober fit young man that would warm the heart of any backseat home secretary in the land.

“Do you think he let his assailant in?” I asked.

“It seems that way,” he said. “What do you think?” Police officers, like African matrons at a wedding, are acutely aware of the subtle and all-but-invisible gradations in status. We were the same rank and about the same age but the disadvantage I suffered from being on his patch had to be balanced against the fact that I’d arrived in a Jaguar XJ V8 that was blatantly borrowed from Diplomatic Protection. We settled for a kind of uneasy bonhomie and, like the African matrons, providing nobody had spiked the punch bowl, we’d probably get through the encounter without an embarrassing incident.

“Did he have an alarm system?” I asked.

“Yeah,” said Trollope. “A good one.”

The bungalow was a hideous redbrick structure built, if I had to guess, in the early 1980s by some hack architect who’d been aiming at art deco and hit Tracey Emin instead. The interior was as characterless as the exterior, World of Leather sofa, generic flat-pack furniture, fitted kitchen. There were three separate bedrooms, which surprised me.

“Did he have a family?” I asked.

Trollope checked his notes. “Ex-wife, daughter, grandchildren—all living in Melbourne, Australia.”

The two spare bedrooms looked like they were last furnished in the 1980s and were neat, tidy, and unlived-in. Trollope said that Johnson had a Polish woman who “did” for him twice a week. “It was her that found the body,” he said.