‘Move it!’ Vermeer’s leaning out of the window yelling at the white delivery van blocking our entrance onto Bloemgracht. Result, nothing of note. She slides back and flips on the siren and lights. Two seconds later the van starts with a jump, then gets moving.

We’re here because at the same time Kleine was hurling wine onto the table, Kush was testing out the seat fabric in the car, checking it met with his stringent durability tests. Unfortunately the fabric failed, as did the foam inside, the seat belts and even the faux leather on the gearstick handle. From about fifteen metres out the whole thing looked like a snow globe just after it’s been shaken.

Result: strained relations. After we’d cleared up the worst of it into a bunch of large evidence bags which had been in the boot, I’d floated the idea of dropping Kush off at the houseboat for a while. Vermeer concurred. We’re expecting the warrant to come through soon, and we can’t leave him in the car again whilst we’re searching the place. The journey hadn’t mellowed Vermeer’s mood, not least because, as she’d loudly proclaimed when we’d gone over a speed bump in Amsterdam-Zuid, ‘Great, now I’ve got a spring up my ass.’

‘We’ll get out here,’ I tell Vermeer.

‘See you back at the station,’ she says as I take the disgraced animal out of the back. ‘If the warrant’s issued in the meantime, I’m not waiting for you.’

As soon as I shut the door she reverses hard, the engine’s high whine drowned out by the bells of Westerkerk striking the hour. We turn into Bloemgracht and I let Kush off the leash. Which is when I see a figure wearing jeans and a hoody step off the shore and onto the gangplank which leads to my houseboat. There’ve been a couple of break-in attempts over the last few years, but they usually wait until the early hours. In both cases they were heroin addicts, looking for items that could be converted into cash. The first was unlucky. Whilst trying to prise open a porthole – a move that wouldn’t have got him anywhere because there was no way he’d’ve been able to squeeze through it even if he had got it open – he’d sliced open his wrist. I’d come back late from a case and found him slumped on deck, minutes from departing the world. If I’d been a few minutes later, or the ambulance hadn’t happened to be close by when I put the call in, he would have died there. The second attempt was when I was on board, and a man had crashed through the front door. I ran at him screaming and the thin weasel-faced addict legged it fast. And now another.

‘Hey!’