Alan Rodwell was somewhere in his late twenties, bald, bespectacled and bearded. He stood barefoot on his front doorstep, wearing mismatched shorts and a T-shirt, blinking at Lucy’s warrant card as she explained who she was and why she was here. A few seconds later, his wife, Sam, came down the hall from the kitchen. She was about the same age, a petite woman, also wearing shorts and a T-shirt, but with flipflops on her feet. She had shoulder-length brown hair, and plain, pale features still marked with makeup from the previous night.

‘We haven’t seen Harry for a couple of days,’ Alan Rodwell said, shaking his head.

‘When do you think you last saw him?’ Lucy asked.

‘Oh, I don’t know. Could be a week ago, easily. I don’t keep a record.’

‘So definitely not since last Tuesday?’

‘Nah, no way.’

‘Do you ever hear him?’ Lucy asked. ‘I mean through the dividing wall between the houses?’

‘Oh, yeah.’ This time it was the woman who answered. ‘In fact, you can hear his TV now. It’s been on for ages. It was on all night last night, and … oh?’

Only belatedly did this seem to strike her as strange.

‘It was on all night?’ Lucy asked.

‘And the night before, I think. And … maybe … hell, I don’t know … maybe the night before that, as well.’

For the last three days in fact, Lucy thought.

‘It never occurred to you, maybe, to go and knock on his door?’

Oddly, the couple glanced at each other with half-smiles, as if they were harbouring some mischievous secret.

‘We don’t really like to complain,’ Alan Rodwell said. ‘I’ll be honest, Harry does that quite a bit with us.’

‘I’m sorry?’ Lucy said.

‘Whenever we’ve got friends round,’ Sam Rodwell explained. ‘During the summer holidays usually. He gets upset if our barbecues go on too late and comes around, making a fuss. We don’t want to do that back to him … he’d just think it was retaliation.’

‘And, you know …’ Alan Rodwell shrugged. ‘Complaining’s not really our thing.’

Lucy looked at them askance. ‘I didn’t mean knock on his door to complain, I mean to check if everything was all right.’

‘Oh …’ Their impish smiles faded.

They shuffled their feet awkwardly but didn’t look guilty or afraid. Hardened criminals often had the ability to brazen things out when they were under suspicion; they could put on a front that even a seasoned detective might find it difficult to penetrate. But when ordinary people like these two had done something wrong, there were usually clear signs. Not so on this occasion. It was as though it hadn’t even struck them yet that they might be in the frame.

‘You’ve been hearing his television play continuously since – when?’ Lucy said. ‘Could it have been as far back as last Tuesday?’