The door was unlocked. It rolled upwards, revealing a dusty pink Hyundai Excel with a gaffer-taped sheet of black plastic sealing a broken rear window. Hirsch felt a jolt: Denise Rennie’s car. Her fear and evasions; ‘Redding’ close in sound to ‘Rennie’; the false address.

He peered in. The car was empty.

Not so the rest of the shed. He edged past the car to a workbench on the end wall—vice; scattered woodworking tools; hammers and saws on a pegboard. Set into the adjacent side wall was a door that presumably led into the house. It was locked.

He looked down. The car sat over an old-style service pit sealed with wooden slats. And, on the floor, evidence of hasty or interrupted gift wrapping: empty carton with an illustration of a pink tricycle, roll of Christmas wrapping paper, sticky tape, pink ribbon. No sign of the bike—and it hadn’t been fully assembled. The saddle still lay on the stained concrete.

A tricycle for a little girl, thought Hirsch. Anna Rennie? It’s Christmas Eve and she’s asleep at last and now Mum or Dad can wrap her present from Santa. The shed door down, just in case she wakes up and gets curious.

Then an interruption. The wrapping didn’t get finished.

Hirsch shuddered, then took himself in hand. He stepped out of the shed and advanced on the house. Onto the veranda. A knuckle rap on the front door.

Waited, tried the door: locked. Knocked again. No answer. Went around to the rear of the house.

The back door was open.

Hirsch nudged it with his forearm, stepped in when it was fully ajar, and saw that he was in a kind of mud room: work boots, rubber boots and old trainers against one wall, coats along a line of hooks, a small cupboard with a shoe brush on top, a broom rack. Two doorways: one to the kitchen, the other to the laundry. Both rooms empty.

But clean crockery gleamed in a rack beside the kitchen sink—several plates and bowls, from a main meal. Last night’s dinner? Not Christmas Day lunch, not if the unfinished tricycle was any indication.

Hirsch stepped through to the dimly lit hallway leading to the front door, aware of three things: a beautifully patterned pressed-tin ceiling; wainscoting; a woman face-down on the floor at the end. There was enough light from a glass panel in the front door for him to see bare legs, pale blue shorts, a T-shirt once yellow but now mostly dark with blood.

Shot in the back before she could reach the door? Before she could warn somebody in one of the front rooms?