‘One of the coppers stayed with the body, calling for back-up on his radio, while the other one went with us – me and the Bestiguis – back inside. He told them to go back in their flat and wait, and then he got me to show him the building. We went up to the top floor again; I opened up Lula’s door, showed him the flat, the open window. He checked the place over. I showed him the lift, still on her floor. We went back down the stairs. He asked about the middle flat, so I opened it up with the master key.

‘It was dark, and the alarm went off when we went in. Before I could find the light switch or get to the alarm pad, the copper walked straight into the table in the middle of the hall and knocked over this massive vase of roses. Smashed and went everywhere, glass an’ water an’ flowers all over the floor. That caused a loada trouble, later…

‘We checked the place. Empty, all the cupboards, every room. The windows were closed and bolted. We went back to the lobby.

‘Plain-clothes police had arrived by this time. They wanted keys to the basement gym, the pool and the car park. One of ’em went off to take a statement from Mrs Bestigui, another one was out front, calling for more back-up, because there are more neighbours coming out in the street now, and half of them are talking on the phone while they’re standing there, and some of them are taking pictures. The uniformed coppers are trying to make them go back into their houses. It’s snowing, really heavy snow…

‘They got a tent up over the body when forensics arrived. The press arrived round the same time. The police taped off half the street, blocked it off with their cars.’

Strike had cleaned his plate. He shoved it aside, ordered fresh mugs of tea for both of them and took up his pen again.

‘How many people work at number eighteen?’

‘There’s three guards – me, Colin McLeod an’ Ian Robson. We work in shifts, someone always on duty, round the clock. I shoulda been off that night, but Robson called me roundabout four in the afternoon, said he had this stomach bug, felt really bad with it. So I said I’d stay on, work through the next shift. He’d swapped with me the previous month so I could sort out a bit of fambly business. I owed him.

‘So it shouldn’ta been me there,’ said Wilson, and for a moment he sat in silence, contemplating the way things should have been.

‘The other guards got on OK with Lula, did they?’

‘Yeah, they’d tell yuh same as me. Nice girl.’

‘Anyone else work there?’

‘We gotta couple of Polish cleaners. They both got bad English. You won’t get much outta them.’

Wilson’s testimony, Strike thought, as he scribbled into one of the SIB notebooks he had filched on one of his last visits to Aldershot, was of an unusually high quality: concise, precise and observant. Very few people answered the question they had been posed; even fewer knew how to organise their thoughts so that no follow-up questions were needed to prise information out of them. Strike was used to playing archaeologist among the ruins of people’s traumatised memories; he had made himself the confidant of thugs; he had bullied the terrified, baited the dangerous and laid traps for the cunning. None of these skills were required with Wilson, who seemed almost wasted on a pointless trawl through John Bristow’s paranoia.