He’d been given a list of all the patients, of course, and it was probably just that, but sitting there, I preferred to think that someone had told him about me. A colleague of a colleague. Word gets around and there’s always some gobshite in the Met you can count on to beat the jungle drums.

‘I’m a DC, too,’ I said. I leaned back and turned to look at the rain running down the small window. ‘Homicide Command East.’

He didn’t look up from his notepad. ‘Right.’

You can imagine how much DC Seddon’s reaction – his lack of it – pissed me off. It was like I’d told him I was Britney Spears. I might just as well have been L-Plate, wittering about chemtrails. He looked up finally and took a deep breath, the hint of a smile to let me know that he understood, and I could see straight away that he didn’t really want to be there. That he thought interviewing a bunch of mentals was a colossal waste of time.

Hard to blame him for that, mind you.

‘Miss Armitage . . . you understand we’re here this morning to gather as much information as we can about what might have happened on the evening of Mr Connolly’s death. That’s Saturday evening, yes? Two evenings ago.’

So Connolly was Kevin’s second name.

‘You could start by telling me anything you think might be important, anything you might have seen or heard that you think could help?’

I said nothing and turned towards the window again. I was going to make Steve work for it a bit, see what he was made of.

‘OK, so let me ask you if you saw anyone going towards Mr Connolly’s room—’

‘I saw loads of people, obviously,’ I said. ‘Members of staff, other patients. All sorts of comings and goings.’

‘Let me be more specific then. What about after eight-thirty? We know Mr Connolly went to bed early, just after dinner, so . . . ’

I thought about it, but not about his question. It was blindingly obvious that they had not yet managed to establish the time of death. ‘I didn’t see anything suspicious,’ I said.

‘Nobody hanging around near Mr Connolly’s room?’

‘No.’

He scribbled something, but I couldn’t make it out. ‘So, can you recall what you were doing that evening?’

‘I was watching TV until about ten o’clock,’ I said. ‘Plenty of others in there with me, so easy enough to corroborate. Casualty and some rubbish with Ant and Dec. After that, I sat nattering in the dining room with Shaun and Tony. We were still in there when the body was discovered.’

He wrote some more. ‘Thank you.’

‘Was it a stabbing?’ He looked up, put his pen down. ‘Easiest way, I would have thought. Nice and quiet.’