‘I understand perfectly,’ Sleizner said, and caught himself already planning how to clean up the blood spatter on the walls and get the body out of the flat. ‘But the thing is, she borrowed a CD and some other things off me and she might have left them here.’

‘A compact disc of what?’

‘Pardon?’

‘You said she’d borrowed a CD. What CD?’

‘Well, um…’ Why had he said that? He didn’t even like music. ‘Huey Lewis and the News. Some best-of collection. But it was signed, from the last time I saw them live, so it had a lot of sentimental value.’

Surprisingly, the man seemed to ponder that. Instead of just spitting out a no, he stood there scratching his pathetic goatee.

‘Wow,’ he said at length and nodded. ‘Huey Lewis and the News, that’s one of my absolute favourite bands.’ He held out his hand and smiled. ‘And you’ve seen them live. That’s more than I can say.’

Sleizner reluctantly took the bogey hand in his and hoped the handshake wouldn’t be followed by a hundred idiotic questions he couldn’t answer. ‘Sadly, I haven’t seen any of their albums around. Except my own, of course. But I did find a shoebox on the top shelf of the wardrobe. Something in that might be yours. Wait here, I’ll go get it.’

The man disappeared into the flat. Sleizner seized the opportunity to poke his head into the living room and concluded that the bloke was obsessed with elephants. Everything, from the curtains and the rug to the cushions on the sofa, was covered with elephants of various colours. The same thing with the souvenirs in the bookcase and the figurines next to the TV. Elephants, elephants and more elephants. Even the legs of the coffee table were in the shape of elephant feet.

‘Here.’ The man handed him a shoebox.

So the little slut had left something behind after all. He didn’t know what to expect. But with luck, it might be something of interest. An address, a phone number, a receipt from Netto or discount stamps from Joe & the Juice. It didn’t matter what, so long as it was an embryo of something that could point him in the right direction.

At the top were a number of unused postcards that were really advertisements in disguise. A wristwatch had stopped at seven minutes to eleven on the twenty-first. There were also some pens, a chewed-up eraser and a box of Ga-Jol that rattled when he shook it. At the bottom, he found a notepad with about half its pages torn out; when he held it up to the light, he finally reaped the rewards of his labour.