The case broke just after three p.m. The station was quiet and I was engaged in a classic bit of work avoidance. The work I was avoiding was a final report on a pointless theft case I’d been assigned, which I had no hope of ever resolving, and the avoidance consisted of scrunching up bits of paper and trying to lob them into the bin three desks away. My score at the point the call came in was zero, paper balls scattered far and wide, everywhere but the bin itself. So I was all over the new distraction.

The body of a young female had been found in a flat in the Nieuw-West. The officer on scene gave me the rundown: a neighbour had noticed blood seeping under the door to flat seven on the second floor of a four-storey block. I got there less than twenty minutes later.

She was lying in a misshapen pool of her own blood, slumped in the pose that, when it’d been described to me over the phone hadn’t made any sense, but which made even less when I actually saw it. The reason for all the blood became clear when the forensics arrived and lifted her body – the slit across her throat like an awful grin. I kept thinking of abattoirs and couldn’t get the word ‘slaughter’ out of my mind.

I called into the station, spoke to Station Chief Smit, and he put Hank de Vries on it with me. We were young, we were outraged, we were the Gods of Righteousness and we worked the case like it was everything.

But right up front we hit a complication: the victim turned out to be Lucie Muller, daughter of the prominent judge, known for his hardline attitude to criminals in a system that was famous worldwide for its softer approach, favouring rehabilitation over incarceration. Such a cruel death as Lucie Muller suffered doesn’t leave any room for irony, but still.

The first question to tackle was why Lucie would be living in an area better known for immigrant unrest than housing the well-heeled offspring of a rich and powerful man such as Judge Muller. After a bit of digging it turned out the answer was she’d rebelled against her privileged upbringing by slumming it the way only rich kids can. A rebellion that brought her into contact with the kind of people she probably had no real idea, ironically given her father’s occupation, of just how dangerous they were.

One of whom, the man we suspected was her killer, had been caught on CCTV entering the building prior to her murder, and leaving not long after. But as he’d taken the precaution of wearing a cap and hoody, and knew exactly where the cameras were angled, we had no image of his face.