Harper crouched down so that the lock on the door was at eye level. “This isn’t secure. Could have been turned from the outside with a screwdriver. Easy.”

Thrupp said, “It’s still not enough. I need a suspect. Or at the very least, a weapon. This case is borderline right now. I could put you and Atkinson on it and be done. Tell me why you need a CSI team.”

Jo darted her eyes around the room once more. With her head close to the bath, she spotted a tiny clump of brown hair clinging to the metal rim of the plughole. It was still attached to a fragment of skin. Nothing about the smooth surface of the bath rim indicated that it could have caused skin to detach; no flaws or sharp edges.

“Here, sir,” she said.

Thrupp came closer. He took out his phone and photographed the fragment. Then he straightened up, nodded to Harper, and said, “You can have everything you need.”

She cleared her throat. “Thank you, sir.”

After Thrupp had gone, Joanna radioed for Atkinson to come up. More officers were arriving every minute. Soon the place would be crawling with forensic officers, and she wanted to take one last look around before that happened.

When Atkinson appeared in the doorway, Jo noticed that he’d gone slightly green. He kept glancing at his hands, still stained with Gregor Franks’s blood.

“You okay?”

“Me? Yep. Sure. Fine.”

Jo knew he wasn’t fine. “There’s extra psychological supervision available for this kind of situation, Steve. You want me to arrange that for you?”

“It’s not that.”

She looked him in the eye. “Oh?”

“Well, it is that, sort of. No one likes being covered in someone else’s blood, do they?”

“Do you need to take a break?”

He swallowed, stood up straight. “No. I want to get on with it.”

She gave him a long look, and decided to take him at his word. There wasn’t time to do anything else. “Okay. Gather a team to search for a weapon—heavy object, something with sharp corners, I think, though we can have the details narrowed down by forensics once they’ve seen the wound.”

Atkinson stepped away to convey the instruction to the other officers on scene. As he adjusted the radio, a streak of red on his hand caused Jo to inspect her own hands. Picking at the dried blood under her nails, she felt nothing much except for a trace of sympathy for her buddy, for the fact that Atkinson had been rattled by what they’d found. All police officers were human. Some, like herself, simply found it easier to detach themselves from the grittier parts of the job. Jo saw this aspect of her personality as a strength, though very occasionally she wondered if other people had something she was missing, something overtly emotional.