That was unusual. Old folks, particularly those who’d suffered at the hands of criminals, were normally glad of police company; they’d tea and biscuit you to death just to keep you on their property. But this situation was clearly different, and most likely that was down to the loss of those precious mementoes.

‘Okay, my love.’ She stood up. ‘I just wanted you to know that we’re still on the case. We’ll keep working it till we get some kind of result.’

Outside, Lucy wandered down the drive and halted by the gatepost.

As a rule, the average householder in the UK was more frightened of burglars than any other kind of criminal. On one hand, there were viable reasons for this; but on the other, there were equally viable reasons why they should actually be much less afraid.

There was no doubt that the prospect of some stranger trespassing in your home, usually after they’d forced entry while you were out, and rooting through your personal stuff, was quite horrifying. It was also a commonplace crime; it happened a lot and at all levels of society. All of this made burglars as feared as they were hated. Any man so callous as to force his way into your house had to be one of society’s worst, a fearless law-breaker who’d think nothing of brutally attacking any householder that got in his way. This was a person to be terrified of, right?

Wrong.

Most burglars in Lucy’s experience were skinny little wimps. Drug-addled teenagers, or inadequate adults who stole from other people because they were too weak and ineffectual to hold down a job, and who broke into dwellings because they were easy targets. And more likely than not, they’d run for their lives if they ever met someone there.

Of course, none of that made vulnerable, elderly people like Reg Murgatroyd feel any the less besieged on dreary housing estates like Hatchwood Green.

Even eleven years into the job, it made Lucy’s blood boil that a chap like Murgatroyd, who, in his own youth, braved the bombs and bullets of Rommel’s Afrika Korps now had to eke out his final years in this state of oppression. If that wasn’t enough to move you to tears, the guy’s stoicism certainly would. Reg might have been a tad unfriendlier than she’d seen him previously, for some reason ill-at-ease to have her in his presence, but he still represented that stiff-upper-lip generation, who, having shrugged off the horrors of a war that killed sixty million, were clearly not going to let a few minor disasters in civilian life inconvenience them.

‘Bits of metal at the end of the day,’ he’d said.

Bits of metal, Lucy thought.

At first, she didn’t understand why this seemed relevant to her.

And then the penny dropped.