‘Couldn’t she have gone in through the underground car park and avoided them?’

‘Yeah, she did that sometimes when Kieran was with her, ’cause she’d given him a control for the electric doors to the garage. But Mick didn’t have one, so it had to be the front.

‘I said good morning, and I asked about the snow, ’cause she had some in her hair; she was shivering, wearin’ a skimpy little dress. She said it was way below freezing, something like that. Then she said, “I wish they’d fuck off. Are they gonna stay there all night?”’Bout the paps. I told her they were still waiting for Deeby Macc; he was late. She looked pissed off. Then she got in the lift and went up to her flat.’

‘She looked pissed off?’

‘Yeah, really pissed off.’

‘Suicidal pissed off?’

‘No,’ said Wilson. ‘Angry pissed off.’

‘Then what happened?’

‘Then,’ said Wilson, ‘I had to go into the back room. My guts were starting to feel really bad. I needed the bathroom. Urgent, yuh know. I’d caught what Robson had. He was off sick with his belly. I was away maybe fifteen minutes. No choice. Never had the shits like it.

‘I was still in the can when the bawling started. No,’ he corrected himself, ‘first thing I heard was a bang. Big bang in the distance. I realised later, that must’ve been the body – Lula, I mean – falling.

‘Then the bawlin’ started, getting louder, coming down the stairs. So I pull up my pants and go running out into the lobby, and there’s Mrs Bestigui, shaking and screaming and acting like one mad bitch in her underwear. She says Lula’s dead, that she’s been pushed off her balcony by a man in her flat.

‘I tell her to stay where she is and I run out the front door. And there she was. Lyin’ in the middle of the road, face down in the snow.’

Wilson swigged his tea, and continued to cradle the mug in his large hand as he said:

‘Half her head was caved in. Blood in the snow. I could tell her neck was broken. And there was – yeah.’

The sweet and unmistakable smell of human brains seemed to fill Strike’s nostrils. He had smelled it many times. You never forgot.

‘I ran back inside,’ resumed Wilson. ‘Both the Bestiguis were in the lobby; he was tryin’ to get her back upstairs, inna some clothes, and she was still bawling. I told them to call the police and to keep an eye on the lift, in case he tried to come down that way.

‘I grabbed the master key out the back room and I ran upstairs. No one on the stairwell. I unlocked the door of Lula’s flat—’

‘Didn’t you think of taking anything with you, to defend yourself?’ Strike interrupted. ‘If you thought there was someone in there? Someone who’d just killed a woman?’

There was a long pause, the longest so far.