No one curious, Lucy thought to herself. It was always a problem when you asked questions like that. The reality was, as proved not two nights ago by the Creep, aka a podgy everyman called Ray Spellman, that the guys who really made this kind of living work were those who shielded themselves behind a façade of inoffensiveness. Again, Harry ought to know that, but as she’d reminded herself before, he had lots of other things on his mind. Anyway, she was here now, which meant they could split up and cover more ground.

Lucy’s first port of call was 19, Durkin Crescent.

She had already met Reg Murgatroyd twice before. In her uniform days, she’d interviewed him after he’d witnessed a brawl at Hatchford Green Railway Club, which had seen someone glassed and badly disfigured. Thanks to his evidence, she’d made an arrest and a well-known thug called Keiron Penrose had subsequently gone to prison. It had been brave of the old soldier even to make a statement, given the reputation of Penrose and his family, but the loss of their violent son seemed to take the wind out of their sails, and there’d been no repercussions.

During a follow-up visit to Murgatroyd’s home, he’d treated Lucy to a cuppa and to some of his old war stories, most of which concerned his days as a Desert Rat. He’d also told her that he still lived in the bungalow he and his late-wife, Daisy, had first moved into not long after he was demobbed, but complained that during the decades since, he’d been forced to watch his formerly beloved Hatchwood Green degenerate, using his own words, ‘into a cesspool’.

Even now, as Lucy plodded up Reg’s front drive, of all the houses on this particular road, his bungalow was the best-kept, the woodwork recently painted, the brickwork re-pointed, the tiles on the roof realigned.

The interior was as immaculate as the exterior. Typical of a former military man, she supposed. There wasn’t a great deal of furniture inside the house – Reg was ninety-five after all, and hardly rolling in wealth – but there wasn’t a hint of dust or damp.

The old man hadn’t initially clicked that Lucy was a police officer until he saw her warrant card, but then it was three years since they’d last spoken.

Reg himself hadn’t changed a great deal. Never the tallest man, no more than five-six, he’d doubtless once possessed a solid, soldierly build, but great age had reduced this. These days, he was shrivelled, his white shirt hanging on his short, skeletal frame in loose, empty folds. Even though they were patently too large for him, his trousers possessed no front button, his braces alone serving to keep them up.