‘Sometimes you’re just going to get jobs like this,’ Maggie said. ‘Doesn’t matter how much you know you’ve got the right person, it won’t go your way.’ She leaned against her boyfriend. ‘Maybe you should just chalk it up and let it go.’

I was starting to agree with her, but Johnno wasn’t having it.

‘We’re making it too complicated,’ he said. ‘Coming at it from too many angles and getting . . . bogged down.’

‘Bogged down and buggered up,’ I said.

‘Letting all this evidence we’ve got get in the way.’

‘Not to mention the evidence we haven’t got.’ I remember I had a gobful of spring roll or ribs or whatever. ‘That bastard camera.’

‘Sod the camera.’ Johnno tossed his fork down and sat forward. ‘We don’t need the camera . . . we go after him. The cocky prick thinks he’s laughing, because he knows very well he can dance round everything we’ve got. So we forget all that and start again. We find something else. We do what we do and we come up with a way to nail him.’

I remember how worked up Johnno was that night, and I’ll never forget how excited he was five months later. That was the day we walked out of court having seen Ralph Cox get sent down. Life, with a minimum tariff of twenty-one years.

Six months for every one of those stab wounds.

Long story short, we started digging and found a report filed nine months previously, when Cox had lived south of the river. A woman who lived upstairs from him whose complaint of violent harassment had never been passed on. We brought Cox in for a friendly chat and Johnno broke the scumbag in the interview room.

Wood for the trees, right?

I woke up in the middle of the night and someone was having a shouting match with themselves a few doors along. A proper ding-dong. It sounded like Lucy, but it wasn’t a big deal because I was well used to it, and anyway I didn’t think that was what had woken me.

I was wide awake and sitting up because I knew.

The police had got it all arse about face. I mean, up to that point so had I to a degree, but now I knew exactly where I’d been going wrong. Why I’d been bogged down and buggered up.

You’re a star, Johnno.

I’d been wasting valuable time trying to get to the bottom of this or that argument, wondering how drugs had got in and pissing about with daft ideas about hitmen. Newbie mistakes, so bloody stupid. Most important of all, me and DC Seddon both had been casting the net too wide, thanks to Graham and the fun he liked having with mashed potato and the like.

Screw the camera . . .