And yet this defendant was certainly guilty. There couldn’t truly be any doubt.

There was an old joke on Edendale’s Devonshire Estate that you had three options when someone in your family died. You could bury them, cremate them – or just leave them where they fell when you hit them with the poker. Micky Ellis had chosen the Devonshire Estate third option.

When Fry had arrived at the scene, the body of Micky’s girlfriend had still been sprawled right where she’d fallen, half on the rug and half under the bed on the first floor of their council semi. She remembered that the bedroom had lemon yellow wallpaper in pale stripes, and a portable TV set standing on the dresser. She’d noticed a series of cigarette burns on the duvet cover close to the pillow on the left-hand side of the bed, where a personal stereo and a half-read Bridget Jones novel lay on the bedside table. Fry had looked up at the ceiling for a smoke alarm then, but there wasn’t one. And she remembered thinking that maybe Denise Clay had been lucky to live as long as she did.

In this case, it had been the uniforms who made the arrest. The first officers to arrive had found Micky Ellis in the kitchen washing the blood off his hands and worrying about who would feed the dog. It was a walkthrough, a self-solver. Somebody had the job of doing the interviews, of course, as well as taking statements, gathering forensic evidence and putting a case together for the prosecution. And that was down to CID. The DI would be able to add the case to his CV, notching up a successful murder enquiry. It was all very predictable, but at least it didn’t tie up resources the division couldn’t spare. No one wanted the cases that stayed on the books for months, or sometimes years – the cases that Gavin Murfin called ‘whodunits’.

Fry heard a sound and looked up from the file. But it was only one of the students leaving the house. She could tell by the way the music increased in volume as a door opened, then reverted to its normal mind-numbing thud.

The microwave pinged, and she realized she’d forgotten to get out a plate for the quiche. But first she put the orange juice back and opened a bottle of Grolsch instead. There was a shelf full of swing-tops in the fridge. Maybe she’d get a bit drunk on her own tonight. It would ruin her fitness programme, but she needed something to help her sleep. Come the morning, she would have a chat with a funeral director to look forward to before her court appearance in a grubby little murder trial that might drag on for days. And then, if Ripley finally got their act together, she could expect to spend a bit of quality time listening to the voice of a sick, disturbed individual with violent fantasies and intellectual pretensions.