The name on the top file, written in black marker, is Eva-Jayne Puck.

He already knows the basics from the news bulletins, the snatches of radio traffic, and overheard conversations in the staff canteen. Two days ago, she was brutally murdered in the living room of her low-rent flat overlooking Kingsway in Scunthorpe. Somebody strangled her to the very point of death. Then they drove something hard and sharp through her skin, her fat, her bones, and right into her heart. Her downstairs neighbours were disturbed by the sound of a commotion but didn’t call the police until the blood started seeping through the ceiling. When they made their way upstairs, they found a man bleeding in the stairwell. When they made their way to the victim’s flat, they found the door wide open. Found Eva-Jayne, a puddle of gory emptiness.

McAvoy looks at the image of the dead woman as she was in life. There’s a hastily assembled victim profile, tucked in among the various witness reports and the preliminary forensic findings. McAvoy locks eyes with the dead. She’s smiling, in the picture, showing perfect false teeth. There’s a gold sovereign on a chain around her neck, and her hair is rainbow-coloured and stuck up haphazardly at the crown and fringe. He thinks he would probably have liked her. There’s a knowingness in her eyes: a sense of having endured a lot and gleaned no end of wisdom from her traumas and trials. According to the neighbours downstairs, she was a palmist. Read Oracle and Tarot cards. Had a few gentlemen callers and they regularly saw women leaving her apartment in grateful tears.

McAvoy looks at the crime-scene photos. At what was done to her. He feels an emptiness; a queasy sort of sorrow, like a greasy tuber squirming in his gullet. Looks at the handwritten notes beside the full-colour picture of her ruined mouth. Attempts had been made to cut off her tongue. It has been impossible to discern if this was done post-mortem.

McAvoy checks the door. Pulls his phone from his pocket. It’s a new model; the only treat he’s afforded himself since the new job started to put some excess in his bank account. It takes photographs: a technological marvel that seems positively space age. He starts taking pictures: page after page, scanning and skimming and absorbing grisly sentences and grainy shots.

He stops when he reads the witness statement. The man on the stairs owned a property in the building and had been calling to hear a resident’s complaint about persistent damp. He’d been waiting in the stairwell, wondering whether the occupant had gone out, when a slim girl with dark hair and piercing eyes had leapt past him, plunging down the stairs and clattering into him like a bowling ball into skittles. He’d fallen backwards, taking his weight on his arm, dislocating his shoulder and smacking his head on the hard floor. He’d lost consciousness for a moment, but he’d seen a figure in black, leaping over him, blood dripping from a curve of silvery blade.