‘My nonno did. All sorts of stories. He was an old man by then, of course. And he spent a lot of time round ours, of course.’ Smiled at them knowingly. ‘That’s Italian families for you. So I saw a lot of him when I was growing up. At what you might call an impressionable age. These days they’d probably call it child abuse, the stuff he used to tell me. How he was captured at Salerno in 1943. His mates ripped to dog meat by British artillery, the infantry doing the rest of them with rifles and bayonets. Scotsmen, he said. He always liked employing Jocks in the firm, reckoned they were the hardest bastards going. He survived by getting shot and then playing dead. And he ended up in the Lea Valley, as a prisoner of war. Met a girl, stayed after the war. Made a name for himself, a man to respect. Which for an Italian, in those days, meant he had to be a right hard bastard. And trust me, he was. You should have heard the stories he told me. Some of it would have your arses doing the old five-pence fifty-pence tremble.’

He’d grinned, staring off into space, eyes still dead. And then he’d turned that stare on the two mugs. And Eddie had reckoned he could hear the pennies dropping. And the creak of contracting sphincters, as they realised what they were in for. And in that moment Eddie had known for a fact that in Joe’s mind both men were already dead. Which was why that stare still had such a power to chill him. A power of which he was pretty sure Joe was all too well aware. He looked up to find Joe waiting for him in silence. As if knowing exactly where Eddie’s mind had been.

‘Play that recording again.’

A 999 call made at 02.39 that morning. From a burner, of course. No clues there. A copy of the recording had been provided to the Major Investigation Team hunting the Car Park Killer. And quietly lifted from their database by Jason Felgate. Who knew their DCI’s habitual password from years gone by. A calculated risk, Eddie guessed. Probably calculated by Jason as less risky than continued non-delivery of any results. He pushed the play button.

‘Police, please state your emergency.’

‘This ain’t my voice, so don’t bother trying to analyse it. The geezer doing the talking ain’t on any databases.’

The first few words confirming that whoever had hit number 37 had their shit in a tidy pile. Either a proper local or working hard to sound like one. Bother pronounced “bovver”, Catherine Tate style. G’s omitted, h’s likely to be dropped. The word “geezer” trying a little too hard though, to Eddie’s mind. And the voice not quite natural. Put through some sort of filter to deepen and distort it just enough to be unrecognisable. Eddie pressed stop.