He looked again at the houses. The one at the end had two little attics, a narrow, angled staircase leading up to them. Each room had a fireplace, an original ceramic surround with floral patterns in relief on the tiles, an unexpected touch of elegance. For his entire childhood, a small vase of plastic flowers had sat in each fireplace. Other than that, the rooms had stood bare and unused. They could never persuade their grandma to do anything with the attics. When she died, they sold the house to a mobile hairdresser. Did he still live there? Had he done anything with the top floor?

DS Joe Romano spent the next couple of minutes wondering whether he could use his warrant card to talk his way into the house and have a quick look at the attics. While he was there, he might just pop down into the cellar and see if he could find his grandma’s old mangle.

He finished his pint and considered another. It was only as he was walking back to the bar that he remembered why he was here. Mrs Shaw had lost her son and didn’t know where to find him.

4

The terraced houses down behind the Brick were a little less impressive than the ones over the way, where his grandparents had lived. Same vintage but not quite as large. Attics with staircases? Lofts more likely. Trapdoor in the ceiling. There were about a dozen streets, hypnotic in their sameness, something majestic in the repetition, age-darkened red brick houses lined up to order, one after the other, street after street, the columns of a Victorian terracotta army, imperious in its discipline.

But as he walked up Claremont Road he noticed that the lintels of many houses had been painted in red or black gloss, and several houses had their entire façades done in sickly, brick-like colours. This wasn’t how he remembered the area. What had once been a latticework of neat, identical houses had mutated into something less uniform, dowdier, more random; wheelie bins outside, crappy double glazing, old satellite dishes that nobody’d bothered to take down. The odd nicely maintained one – white sash windows, a decent wooden door, the immediately recognizable patina of ordered living – looked out of place amid the general malaise, like a bloke wearing Harris tweed to go dogging.

Wortley, West Leeds: the Romano family had been based here since the early 1900s. The area had seen better days. Then again, he thought as he made his way along the street, wishing he’d had that second pint, you could say the same about the Romanos.