Kitchen. Coffee. He looked around as he waited for the kettle to boil. It was not unlike the kitchen in Jane Shaw’s house, only this didn’t feel like his kitchen. Didn’t feel like anyone’s. Its fixtures were tasteful yet bland. Even the mugs lined up on the worktop surface were cloyingly anonymous in their sameness. The bottle of fancy Italian olive oil and a half-eaten baguette hardly lifted the tone.

As he spooned instant coffee into a rented mug, he tried to calculate how many meals he’d cooked here for more than one person since Sam had gone off to Edinburgh. The answer, he told himself with a bit of a smile, was zero.

Then his phone buzzed. He pulled it from his pocket and stared, his eyes taking longer than usual to register the information on the small screen.

It was her.

‘You didn’t strike me as a Facebook kind of person!’ she said as soon as he answered.

‘Oh, I’m sorry!’

‘What for?’

He wondered whether he should lie. But how could he?

‘I… don’t know. I was just…’

‘Looking me up. I was doing the same with you. You haven’t been in the news for a while, Detective Romano!’

‘I haven’t been on a high-profile case for a while.’

‘Well, you are now. Don’t forget, we still have to do that interview.’

‘Tomorrow?’

‘Great. Look, I better get to bed. I’ve got advanced Maths first thing in the morning. It was lovely to see you, Joe.’

‘Yes. It was. It really was. I’ll be in touch tomorrow.’

He stood there, phone in his hand, as the swirling confusion in his brain began to lift. Or rather, there was now a semblance of clarity pushing through the drunkenness, as if he had two minds working in tandem: the yin and yang of the thoughtful drunk, or the Laurel and Hardy.

He made his coffee and went back to the living room, setting the mug down on the dining table in the corner. Then, reaching all the way across the table with an arm, he swept everything else – books, old newspapers, bills, a few new CDs that he hadn’t played yet – to the floor.

‘Right. Where the hell is it?’

He stopped, drank some coffee, then staggered off to search the house.

Five minutes later, the few cupboards that had anything in them had been ransacked, their contents now spilling out on the carpet, but haphazardly, as if a burglar had started the job then given up in disgust.