The stairs down to the scene were so narrow that we had to wait for a herd of forensics types to come up before we could go down. There’s no such thing as a full-service forensics team. It’s very expensive, so you order bits of it up from the Home Office like a Chinese takeout. Judging by the number of noddy suits filing past us Stephanopoulis had gone for the super-deluxe meal for six with extra egg fried rice. I was, I guessed, the fortune cookie.

Like most toilets in the West End of London, the ones in the Groucho were cramped and low-ceilinged from being retrofitted into the basement of a town house. The management had lined them with alternating panels of brushed steel and cherry-red Perspex—it was like a particularly creepy level of System Shock 2. Not helped by the bloody footsteps leading out.

“The cleaner found him,” said Stephanopoulis, which explained the footsteps.

On the left were square porcelain washbasins, in front a line of bog-standard urinals, and tucked away on the right, raised up a couple of steps, was the one and only toilet stall. The door was being held open with a couple of strips of masking tape. I didn’t need to be told what was inside.

It’s funny how the mind processes a crime scene. For the first few seconds your eye just slides away from the horror and fixes on the mundane. He was a middle-aged white guy and he was sitting on the loo. His shoulders were slumped and his chin was resting on his chest, making it hard to see his face, but he had brown hair and the start of a bald patch at the crown of his head. He was wearing an expensive but worn tweed jacket that had been half pulled down his shoulders to reveal a rather nice blue-and-white pin-striped shirt. His trousers and underwear were around his ankles, his thighs were pale and hairy. His hands hung limply between his legs, I guessed he’d been clutching his groin right up until the point he’d lost consciousness. His palms were sticky with blood, the cuffs of his jacket and shirt soaked in it. I made myself look at the wound.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” I said.

Blood had poured into the toilet bowl and I really didn’t want to be the poor forensics sod who had to go fishing around in it later. Something had excised the man’s penis, right at the root just above his bollocks, and unless I was mistaken left him clutching what was left until he bled out.