‘She yelled at you that you wouldn’t get a penny, even if you killed her. As you fought, and you forced her across her sitting room towards that balcony and the drop, she told you she had another brother, a real brother, and that he was on his way, and that she’d made a will in his favour.

‘“It’s too late, I’ve already done it!” she screamed. And you called her a lying fucking bitch, and you threw her down into the street to her death.’

Bristow was barely breathing.

‘I think you must have dropped the roses at her front door. You ran back out, picked them up, sprinted down the stairs and back into Flat Two, where you rammed them back into their vase. Fuck me, you were lucky. That vase got smashed accidentally by a copper, and those roses were the one clue to show that someone had been in that flat; you can’t have replaced them the way the florist had arranged them, not when you knew you had minutes to get clear of that building.

‘The next bit took nerve. I doubt you expected anyone to raise the alarm straight away, but Tansy Bestigui had been on the balcony below you. You heard her screaming, and realised you had even less time to get out of there than you’d been counting on. Wilson ran out to the street to check Lula, and then, waiting at the door, staring through the peephole, you saw him run upstairs to the top floor.

‘You reset the alarm, let yourself out of the flat and edge down the stairwell. The Bestiguis are bellowing at each other in their own flat. You run downstairs – heard by Freddie Bestigui, though he had other preoccupations at the time – the lobby’s empty – you run through it and out on to the street, where it’s snowing thick and fast.

‘And you ran, didn’t you; hoodie up, face covered, gloved hands pumping. And at the end of the street, you saw another man running, running for his life, away from the corner where he’d just seen his sister fall to her death. You didn’t know each other. I don’t think you had a thought to spare for who he was, not then. You ran as fast as you could, in Deeby Macc’s borrowed clothes, past the CCTV camera that caught you both on film, and off down Halliwell Street, where your luck caught up with you again, and there were no more cameras.