I get up and open the bathroom door. Kush clambers out of the bath and follows me through to the kitchen where he stretches, front paws out, back concave and head down as if he’s praying to some kind of doggy deity. Which he kind of is, because I Am the God of Food. I dispense some in a suitably grand manner and leave him to it. I check my phone, and there’s a text from Sabine saying she had to leave early, and that she’d had a great night.

It’s misty outside, and the thick black paint coating the deck is slippery with moisture. Silver with it too. Tram bells clang over on Rozengracht and cyclists glide in and out of the mist. There’s a strong smell of tar which I think must be coming from Leah’s boat. I lean against the side rail as I take my first pull of the day.

Contrast with the station. Bustle, noise, chaos and stress.

Turns out the sirens of my dream might have been real. A man had sprayed a liquid into a crowd of revellers at Rembrandtplein at just past two in the morning. The liquid has yet to be fully identified, though clearly from its effects it was a strong acid, and the whole incident has been declared terror-related. Which means Vermeer’s team has been pruned back to the bone, the bone in this case being Vermeer, Jansen, myself and just two junior officers. And Kush. Because I can’t leave him on board all day, and don’t know what else to do with him.

Vermeer raised an eyebrow when I walked in, but I notice that just ten minutes later he’s positioned himself next to her and she’s absent-mindedly stroking him whilst she works on something on her computer. Jansen has joined us in the meantime; he’d been out for a run and had walked into the office in socks, carrying a pair of expensive running shoes and huffing and puffing like he’d just completed a twenty-four-hour Iron Man. A wedge of sweat darkened his T-shirt. Vermeer took one look at it and told him to clean up, and quick.

With the numbers so low the project of tracking the two victims’ movements over the last couple of years has ground to a halt, though I note that they’d got a few points up on a map before they’d been reassigned last night. I stare at it, trying to see something, a pattern that’s so far been missed. But nothing leaps out at me.