He got settled down on his uncomfortable, mid-priced sofa, a dish of microwaved tagliatelle on his lap, and switched on Look North. The Graphite Assassin was still the lead story. There’d been a bit of a media scrimmage outside Kirklees HQ sometime in the afternoon when Rita emerged to deliver the news that they were still questioning a man. A sizeable crowd had gathered by then, blocking the steps of the building, several banners of the Patriot League held up for the cameras. She didn’t add anything new, but managed to hint that they were near a breakthrough.

The item was about a minute long, and the drunken photo of Joe and Chris was only shown right at the end, the image only on screen for a couple of seconds. He saw himself: the face of an older man, of someone else, eyes tinged with red and held unnaturally open for the camera, the sense of being relaxed yet unsure of himself. Cautious in pleasure. Is that what he was? A man unsure of himself?

He put his pasta to one side and poured a glass of wine as the news moved on. For a moment he considered searching for the photo on the internet, just to see how many websites and blogs now featured his face. He had a web browser on the TV. Once, after a long evening alone with too much wine, he’d used it to search the internet for porn, only to find that when he tried to turn it off again, he couldn’t. He’d managed to press the wrong button, and the frozen image of a gurning sex actress was left on screen until he got up and switched the whole TV off. And she was still there when he turned it back on. The longest fake orgasm in history.

He sat there and savoured his wine for a while. Then he let out a long, dog-tired sigh, turned the news off and made a start on all the background reports he’d ordered the previous night.

He began with Mark Sugden, the cocky twat who’d sounded a good deal less cocky today. Sugden had grown up in Todmorden, the epicentre of Happy Valley. One arrest for breach of the peace at a fracking demonstration. Jobs in various libraries, interspersed with periods as registered unemployed. Previous and current addresses all in and around Halifax and Brighouse.

‘Sticks close to the Valley,’ he said, getting up and moving across to the table, where his metre-square plan of the case was laid out.