She’d been dragged there by her boyfriend James Murray, also seventeen. James told the paramedics and everybody else in the immediate vicinity that ‘It was just E’s, it was just E’s.’ Had he taken them? Yes, he had. Who else was in the flat? It was just them. Oh god, it was just E’s.

Off in the ambulance went the pair of them while both sets of police kicked their problem upstairs until it bounced off DCI Seawoll’s bedroom window.

‘Metaphorically speaking,’ said Seawoll.

The ‘entrance hall’ was the wide, wedge-shaped, low ceilinged room with an unparalleled view over Hyde Park. I was getting used to the sheer amount of money wasted on the furniture, which was spread out like something designed for The Sims. In amongst the money there were signs that people had been having a good time — more bottles, wine glasses, empty cellophane packets, a flat pool of oatmeal coloured vomit on the carefully chosen hand-woven cream wool rug. Definitely more than two people. At least six or seven, I thought. Maybe more, if they were particularly tidy teens.

Not so tidy that they didn’t leave their pills behind when they scrambled to get out.

‘We think they left as soon as James Murray made his 999 call,’ said Seawoll. Both the police and the paramedics entered a description of the pills into the TICTAC database and got a name – Magic Babars – and the worrying information that this particular brand tended to be heavy on the PMA, otherwise known as paramethoxyamphetamine, or Dr Death. Not MDMA, otherwise known as Ecstasy, otherwise known as the drug that allows you to listen to really dull music without your brain imploding from boredom. Seriously. PMA is a lot more toxic than MDMA and kicks in slower, so users have been known to swallow another couple of pills thinking the first were duds, and then suffer what Dr Walid would describe as ‘deleterious effects’.

Given that Christina Chorley had died on the way to hospital, it was important to find out who else had taken the Magic Babars in case they needed treatment – and to find out quickly. Before James Murray keeled over himself.

At first James had tried to claim that he and Christina had been alone in the flat, but five minutes with DI Stephanopoulos, who, having been pulled untimely from her wife’s embrace, was particularly pissed off that morning, saw him coughing names as fast as they could be written down.

‘Amongst them was the name Olivia Jane McAllister-Thames,’ said Seawoll. ‘Now, I’ve got a few questions that need answering. Like, how did they get in? Where did the drugs comes from? And can I get a result before this case turns into a great big fucking media shit storm?’