‘Have you found any trainers?’ Claire asked.

‘Yes, downstairs I think,’ she said, without turning round. ‘And jogging bottoms. But they are black, not grey. And they don’t seem to have any dog bites in them.’

Claire laughed. ‘He’d have to be really dim not to have chucked them. Oh, did you see that?’ Claire said, pointing at the windowsill, where a bodybuilder’s supplement bottle sat.

The woman eased herself up to her knees, sighed heavily and asked: ‘Did you want me to take that as well?’ She pulled out a paper evidence envelope.

‘That’s not what I mean. If this guy is a bodybuilder, which that seems to indicate, we might find some weights around the house.’

The woman looked blankly at her.

‘Remember what the murder weapon was?’ Claire asked, folding her arms.

‘Ah. See what you mean.’ The woman scratched her head. With a Tyvek hood and gloves, it was as noisy as someone rustling for sweets during a love scene in the cinema.

Claire left her to it. In the end the weights were not found in the bedroom, but in the garage. Substantial gym weights, a stand, a bench press, and a cross trainer. The hand weights were modern and cushioned, not at all like the crude cast iron weapon that had been smashed into Mrs Roy’s skull. She looked around her, and found another connection. There were three bicycles hung on hooks on the wall. Each was as light as a feather and probably highly expensive. The tyres were of a tubular high-pressure road variety, quite unlike the wide mountain bike tyres whose impression was left at Ashtead Common. Nonetheless, this was quite encouraging. The DNA put him at the scene, he lived nearby, he was a cyclist, seemed to be a bodybuilder and owned hand weights. The one fly in the ointment was that there was no obvious motive. Perhaps it could really have been an argument about the dog. Perhaps Jason Waddington had a temper. Considering the damage he had done to Mrs Roy’s skull, that would be some tantrum. If so, then he certainly deserved to be locked up for a very long time indeed.

Nearly five o’clock on Thursday, and the promised forensic results on the murder weapon had yet to arrive. Gillard rang the forensic lab’s operations manager and was told that they had managed to extract enough DNA, but the comparison process was not yet complete.

‘My problem is that I’ve got someone here who has to either be charged with a crime or released in one hour’s time. I really need to know if the hair on the victim’s raincoat matches any sweat samples you’ve managed to lift from the hand weight. Can you get it to me before then?’

‘I’ll do what I can,’ she replied. ‘But I can’t promise.’

‘Okay,’ Gillard sighed. He then read out the unique reference numbers for the two pieces of evidence. The manager said he would pass the message along.