‘So do you have to keep your radio turned off?’ Baz’s own device, a much bespattered item, was sitting on a dust sheet in the boot, along with his tools.

‘No, but I keep it low.’ Baz turned to her. ‘I forgot to mention. Jakes was interviewed by some of your lot last week.’

‘What do you mean “some of my lot”?’ she asked in mock offence.

‘You know, the filth, the Old Bill, the pigs.’ Barry grinned at her. It was part of their family repartee for Barry to slag the police off as corrupt while she denigrated him as an unskilled labourer. The kids loved it. When they were younger they would, at her instigation, pile on him on the sofa while he was watching TV to make an arrest, with nee-nah siren noises and the aid of Dexter the overexcitable Irish wolfhound. Barry, affable as ever, always agreed to be locked in the cupboard under the stairs with the vacuum cleaner for a couple of minutes.

‘It’s about this body that was found on the island in the Thames.’

‘Ah, Craig’s just been given that case. Did Jakes see something?’

‘Nah.’ Baz crinkled his face sceptically. ‘Jakes never sees anything beyond the edge of the trowel. He’s away with the fairies half the time, I tell you. Did you know that he’s got a master’s in philosophy from the Open University?’

‘What’s he doing as a plasterer, then?’ she asked, taunting him again. ‘Playing with the great unwashed.’

‘He went bonkers for a while,’ Baz said, picking from the back of his neck a dried lump of plaster that he’d missed in the shower. ‘Couldn’t hack it.’

‘Bonkers: you are so PC, Baz. The full empathic mental health lexicon.’

‘I love it when you use big words, Claire.’ He laughed, and kissed her on the cheek. ‘Okay. Technically, Jakes was doolally at first, then he went bonkers, and now he’s just fucking mad.’

Claire laughed as they arrived outside the gatehouse, guarded by ten-foot-high wrought-iron gates and stone lions on plinths.

‘Right, this is me.’ Baz turned to her. ‘Jakes does have a bit of an excuse, though. His family fell apart. No mum or dad, just a mad sister.’

‘When was that?’ Claire asked.

‘Long time ago, when he was little.’ Baz got out of the car and picked up his tool bag and radio from the boot.

‘Be kind to him, then,’ Claire called through the open window.

‘I am,’ Baz replied over his shoulder as he strode up to the gatehouse. ‘I always am.’

Half an hour later Baz was standing in the shell of a newly constructed single-storey building. Jakes told him that it was to be a reptile house. The building was partially divided up by numerous stud walls, each of which had a large low window-hole. Baz guessed that those apertures would house glass tanks for the creatures.