‘It must have been difficult for you both,’ was the most diplomacy Ava could muster. ‘So, how did you meet Beef?’

‘He’s the captain of the darts team at my local. Beef’s in construction. Should’ve stuck to my own from the start. Serves me right for trying something new, I guess.’

Ava moved to exit the van.

‘I did love Osaki, for a while, anyway.’

Ava paused to listen.

‘When we first met, you know? He was kind and sweet, sort of exotic. I loved listening to him talk in Japanese. Did you never meet anyone like that? Who just seemed so completely different to anyone else you’d ever known that you just got carried away with it all?’

Ava didn’t have an answer for that.

‘Will you be able to tell me if he had life insurance?’ Kylie finished.

Ava left uniformed officers to deal with the appalling Kylie. She’d thought it impossible to feel any more sympathy for Osaki Shozo than when she’d first seen his body, but the realisation that his life must have been just as miserable as his horrific death was gutting.

Chapter Twenty-One

11 March

Five fifty-four in the morning and he hadn’t slept a wink. He never did after a kill. His body was thrumming, laid on sweat-stained sheets and a mattress that had accommodated increasing amounts of solitary celebration, so much so that its owner was planning on purchasing himself a new one directly following his next salvage operation.

He was the ultimate recycler, the embodiment of green energy, taking the life source of people who’d squandered it and recharging himself, coming out stronger, enhanced from the process.

A crow outside his window shattered the peace. A couple of minutes later a different window opened, accompanied by some colourful cursing. An object was thrown. It landed with a hollow metallic twang, suggesting an empty can. The crow was silent for a moment before recommencing its cawing, laughing at the ridiculous attempt to silence it. Predatory by nature, its feeding and hunting patterns were no different than foxes. Crows would eat eggs and nestlings, even adult birds given half a chance, soaking up the life force of their prey, consuming them, merging with them. It was the circularity of nature.

Life. Not death. He loved animals. Animals fought to survive. They strove to mate, to eat and to protect their young. They never gave in. Not like humans. People were self-obsessed, victims of their own evolution, inward-looking. He wondered exactly when homo sapiens had stopped responding to their environment and started living inside their own heads. They ate pity for breakfast, lunch and dinner. They dissected their emotions as if they were living on the set of a reality TV show. They valued the gift of a life so little that throwing it away had become a nothing. An Internet challenge. A modern-media bedpost notch. Those weak souls were aberrations.