Rohan shrugged. ‘I’m a thirty-six-year-old man. I can deal with it.’

‘And being a real-life detective, how close is it to what Little Rohan imagined?’

‘Ha. Well, different in a multitude of ways, as you might guess,’ he said. ‘For one thing, in a TV detective show, if someone looks guilty but it’s only thirty-five minutes into the episode, you think, “Oh, that obviously guilty guy can’t be the murderer,” because you know there’s another twist coming. In TV, the audiences are trained to expect twists, to assume that “nothing is what it seems”.’

‘But in reality …’

‘In reality, we get a call and walk into a house—’

‘Walk in to see a woman and two kids dead on the floor, and the estranged husband with a self-inflicted gunshot wound,’ Anita said.

‘Yes. And that scene—it is what it looks like. The thing about real police work, there are virtually never any twists. Might be a more constructive process if there were twists we could undo. But I mean, we walk into that house—we know what’s happened, we know what it is—but … oh fuck … then what?’

Anita realised that she’d steered the conversation into a dark place, but Rohan seemed okay with that. That was an advantage of hanging out with cops and the journos who routinely covered ugly stories. They were used to ugly. Dark things were understood, with no need to discuss them overtly. But then, if you did end up going there, you knew the other person could handle it more easily than a civilian could.

‘You mean because the tragic scene in that house isn’t a mystery with an answer?’ said Anita.

‘In a TV drama or a mystery novel, the puzzle gets solved by the end of the story and that neutralises the danger from the psychopath or the “unlikely killer” or whatever kind of monster it is. But in the real job, we can’t kid ourselves. Things are usually pretty much what they seem. We can’t hope for twists. And monsters are still out there.’

Mehta sounded resigned to that, and Anita felt a spike of annoyance. ‘But even if there’s no puzzle to solve, there’s urgency—I mean, to stop it from happening to the next woman, that’s an urgent fucking matter, isn’t it?’

Anita realised she’d snapped at him, firing an unfair amount of anger in his direction. But he seemed to understand and not take it the wrong way.

‘It is,’ he said. ‘It’s urgent.’

‘But I guess at the point you homicide guys are involved in a case, the terrible thing has already happened,’ Anita said.

Mehta nodded bleakly.

‘Same for me. I sit in court covering one murder trial after another. Another dead woman and then another woman, and I don’t … The system is fucked.’

‘I don’t disagree,’ Rohan said. ‘How could I disagree? We’re failing every day.’