In the master bedroom, which was still off-limits to people not wearing noddy suits, I stood in the doorway and examined the bed as best as I could. The forensics team had removed the sheets and pillows but the mattress was still in place with a reddish brown stain a third of the way up from the footboard. Too much blood had soaked in for it to dry out since the body had been removed, so I could still smell it as I walked away to check the other rooms. I’d brought my own gloves with me but I asked Trollope if he had a spare pair to give him something to feel superior about.

If Johnson had died in his bedroom then he’d spent most of his life in the living room. LCD wide-screen TV, DVD with the remotes still on the coffee table by a copy of the Radio Times. There was an antique fold-down writing desk that Trollope said hadn’t been dusted yet so we left it well alone. And a couple of glass-fronted bookcases filled with paperbacks. Penguins, Corgis, and Panthers from the 1960s and ’70s—Len Deighton, Ian Fleming, and Clive Cussler. It looked like the fiction section of a charity shop. The bookshelves were the type that came in two parts, the bottom section acting as a pedestal for the top and being slightly deeper and having opaque doors. Carefully, because they hadn’t been dusted either, I opened the bottom sections to find them both empty except for a couple of scraps of paper—I left those for forensics as well.

There were a couple of surprisingly good hunting prints on the wall as well as a framed photograph of his graduating class at Hendon. I couldn’t work out which shiny young uniform he was. Beside it was a photo of him being handed a commendation by a senior officer whom I later learned was Sir John Waldron, commissioner of the Metropolitan Police 1968–1972, no less. There were family photographs on the mantelpiece, a wedding complete with unfortunate sideburns and flares, a pair of children, boy and a girl, at various ages, toddler, infant school, on a pale yellow beach by a green ocean somewhere foreign. There were a couple taken outside the bungalow where the kids looked to be nine or ten—nothing after that. I did a quick mental calculation and guessed that the latest picture had been taken in the early 1980s. More than thirty years ago.

“The family in Australia are still alive, aren’t they?” I asked. “They weren’t all tragically killed in a car crash or something like that?”

“I’ll have to find out,” said Trollope. “Why?”

“Thirty years is a long time to go without any new photographs,” I said.