‘No, sir. I approached the house—number 23—and looked in through the ground-floor windows, and the window of the basement flat.’

‘What did you see?’

‘Nothing much. Empty rooms.’

‘Empty of people, or entirely empty?’

‘No, they had furniture and stuff in them.’

‘I trust you’ll be able to give DC Dunning a thorough description of each room you peered into, complete with all the stuff you saw.’

DC Dunning. From London? ‘Yes, sir. I’ll do my best.’

The croupier moved forward, opened the file he was holding and placed a blown-up colour photograph on the table: the front of 23 Ruskington Road. With a biro, he pointed at the bay window on the right. ‘Did you look through this window?’

‘Yes.’

‘What did you see?’

‘A dining table and chairs. The table had a glass top. A sideboard against one wall.’ Although it was only last night, Simon found it hard to be certain. He’d taken a quick look and decided there was nothing of any interest: no bookshelves stuffed with books about Quakerism, nor anything else to link the house to Seed. ‘Maybe a rug and . . . a tall plant in a pot? Yeah, I think a plant.’

Dunning and Proust exchanged another look. ‘Anything else?’ Dunning asked.

‘No. Not that I can remember.’

‘What about on the walls?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Was there anything up on the walls?’

Simon struggled to bring to mind an image of the room. ‘I don’t know. I didn’t notice.’

‘Pictures? Photographs?’

‘It was darker inside than out. If there were pictures, I didn’t see . . .’ He stopped. Now would be a bad time to get something wrong. Think. ‘There must have been something on the walls,’ he said eventually.

‘Why must there?’ asked Proust.

‘Like I said, I didn’t notice. I’d more likely have noticed if the walls were bare than if they weren’t. People usually put something up, don’t they? Put it this way: nothing about the room struck me as odd. It looked . . . lived in. Normal.’

‘Did you see anything leaning against a wall?’ asked Dunning.

Simon hadn’t a clue what he was talking about. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Like what?’

‘You say the room looked lived in?’

‘That’s right.’

‘So nothing you saw suggested to you that people might recently have moved in?’

‘No. Such as?’

‘Packing crates, maybe pictures leaning against the wall, waiting to be put up? Picture hooks, a hammer? Cardboard boxes with “dining room” written on them?’

‘No. Nothing like that.’

Dunning retrieved the photograph, replaced it in his file. ‘What next?’ Proust asked.