‘Muffled up to the eyeballs, like his mate; all you could see were his hands. If I’d been him, and had a guilty conscience about the Maserati, I’d have holed up in a bar and exited with a bunch of other people; there’s a place called Bojo’s off Halliwell Street he could’ve gone and mingled with the punters. We checked,’ Wardle said, forestalling Strike’s question. ‘Nobody recognised him from the footage.’

They drank for a moment in silence.

‘Even if we’d found them,’ said Wardle, setting down his glass, ‘the most we could’ve got from them is an eyewitness account of her jumping. There wasn’t any unexplained DNA in her flat. Nobody had been in that place who shouldn’t have been in there.’

‘It isn’t just the CCTV footage that’s giving Bristow ideas,’ said Strike. ‘He’s been seeing a bit of Tansy Bestigui.’

‘Don’t talk to me about Tansy fucking Bestigui,’ said Wardle irritably.

‘I’m going to have to mention her, because my client reckons she’s telling the truth.’

‘Still at it, is she? Still hasn’t given it up? I’ll tell you about Mrs Bestigui, shall I?’

‘Go on,’ said Strike, one hand wrapped around the beer at his chest.

‘Carver and I got to the scene about twenty, twenty-five minutes after Landry hit the road. Uniformed police were already there. Tansy Bestigui was still going strong with the hysterics when we saw her, gibbering and shaking and screaming that there was a murderer in the building.

‘Her story was that she got up out of bed around two and went for a pee in the bathroom; she heard shouting from two flats above and saw Landry’s body fall past the window.

‘Now, the windows in those flats are triple-glazed or something. They’re designed to keep the heat and the air conditioning in, and the noise of the hoi polloi out. By the time we were interviewing her, the street below was full of panda cars and neighbours, but you’d never have known it from up there except for the flashing blue lights. We could’ve been inside a fucking pyramid for all the noise that got inside that place.

‘So I said to her, “Are you sure you heard shouting, Mrs Bestigui? Because this flat seems to be pretty much soundproofed.”

‘She wouldn’t back down. Swore she’d heard every word. According to her, Landry screamed something like “You’re too late,” and a man’s voice said, “You’re a fucking liar.” Auditory hallucinations, they call them,’ said Wardle. ‘You start hearing things when you snort so much coke your brains start dribbling out of your nose.’

He took another long pull on his pint.