I quickly find their details online, and their website boasts of a proven track record in finding and screening suitable candidates for all sorts of clinical trials. Their address is less than fifteen minutes’ drive away, close to the AMC itself. This might cheer Vermeer and Jansen up. I call them over and am just about to take them through what I’ve got when they both get up and flit away like small fish scattering when a shark enters their stretch of water. The shark in this case is Station Chief Frank Beving. A few minutes later I’m standing across from the desk in his office, listening to his condolences about the fire. All delivered with the sincerity of a menopausal supermarket checkout clerk. Duty done, he gets on to the good stuff.

‘Obviously, I’ve heard that subsequent to the fire you weren’t that well?’

‘I was a little upset,’ I concede.

‘Yes, well. The report I have here makes it sound a bit more serious.’

‘I wouldn’t pay any attention to that. You know what patrol are like, drama queens the lot of them.’

He stares at me, but somehow I’m immune to it. It’s weird, a few hours ago I was deep within the dark wolf’s clutches, now I feel like that Sarah Jarosz song which talks of green lights, open roads and skies of endless blue. Which makes me remember that particular CD, along with everything else I owned, is now gone.

Beving picks up a couple of sheets of paper. He spends some time on the first, then peels it back to look at the one underneath. His eyebrows rise. Dear god, spare me the theatrics.

‘No shoes?’ he says. ‘You were found wearing no shoes and mumbling incoherently.’

Why is everyone so hung up on shoes all of a sudden? It’s not like bare feet are illegal or anything.

‘My feet were hot. And I was reciting poetry; you can’t expect patrol to know the difference.’

‘All right, enough horseshit. The point is you were only allowed back on to this investigation because –’

The door bursts open behind me. Roemers, headphones round his neck, a laptop clutched under his arm. ‘Been looking all over for you.’

‘How strange then that you find me in my office.’

‘Not you, him.’

‘What have you got?’ I ask.

He reaches across the desk, roughly shoves a pile of papers out the way, and opens up the laptop. Beving, after pulling a can’t-believe-he-just-did-that face which we both ignore, reluctantly gets up and steps round so he too can see the screen.

‘There you are,’ Roemers says, pointing to the image.

I peer at it. It’s exactly the same as the one I showed him earlier.

‘Yeah, that’s what I gave you.’

He hits the enter key with a flourish worthy of a camped-up stage magician. More theatrics.