It didn’t help that, when he reached the incident room, Vera was at her most jaunty. She’d blagged a proper filter machine from somewhere and the smell of the coffee hit him as soon as he walked in.

‘Where are the others?’ His question. Usually Vera hated people to be late, one of the reasons why he’d been so tense when his way had been blocked by the crawling traffic. Now he hoped to hear her slag off the rest of the team. After all, he’d made the effort to be there.

But she only shrugged. ‘This weather’s a nightmare, isn’t it?’ She poured him coffee. ‘Have you tried Connie this morning?’

He looked at her, suspecting she was mocking him, but she seemed serious enough. ‘Yes, it went straight to voicemail again. I left a message asking her to get in touch.’

‘I’d like her opinion on these.’ Vera pinned a series of sheets onto the board. Copies of the charred paper rescued from the bonfire in Danny Shaw’s garden. ‘More than anyone, she’d know the way Jenny thought about her work.’

‘You’ve dismissed Connie altogether as a suspect then?’

‘Eh, pet, I didn’t say that. That’s another thing entirely.’ She gave the smile that was supposed to be enigmatic, but only made her look constipated.

He carried his coffee to look at the burnt paper more closely, but found it hard to make any sense from the words, even to concentrate on them. He couldn’t understand why Vera was so happy. Holly and Charlie came in together, laughing at a shared joke, and again he felt isolated, an outsider, trapped in the gap between Vera and her troops. I need to move on, he thought. I’ll always be in her shadow.

Vera regarded the latecomers indulgently, waited until they’d fetched coffee and then swung into her performance. It occurred to Ashworth that from these scraps of text she’d deduced some meaning or motive for the murders. That would explain her good humour. In that moment his envy was so intense that he almost hated her.

Vera set out the events of the previous day: the interviews with Veronica Eliot, Lisa, the Shaw family, Freya and Morgan. Joe had to admit that she was bloody good at this summing up, at pulling out links and meanings that would probably have passed him by, at laying out the facts in a way that was easy to follow.

‘It seems to me that the only intended victim was Jenny Lister,’ she said. ‘At first, at least. Danny Shaw was killed because he knew something or found out something about the first killing. The fact that the bonfire in his garden contained documents belonging to Lister suggests that he’d found her notebook.’