In her sitting room, Mrs Shelley had a stuffed barn owl, so old and fossilized that Cooper could have used its beak as a bottle opener. He’d come to think of his landlady as a bit like that stuffed owl. Rather bedraggled and slightly moth-eaten around the pinions, but likely to last for ever, so long as it was valued.

Cooper looked around the conservatory. At the far end, there were so many cobwebs that the spiders would soon be complaining about overcrowding. He needed to make time for a spring clean. He needed to find time for Liz, too, or she’d be complaining he neglected her. He was supposed to have made time for a holiday.

But time was always a problem. For him, and for Randy, there was never enough of it.

Strange how complications seemed to mount up in your life as you got older. In his twenties, everything had seemed very simple. Now, within a few years, he felt as though the world was on his shoulders some days. Was it the creeping infection of responsibility? He had a steady relationship now. He’d been going out with Liz Petty, a civilian crime-scene examiner at E Division, for several months. He ought to be getting to know her fairly well by this time.

And then there was that old, vexed question of promotion. It had come up in conversation with Liz the other night. Over a glass of white wine and a Bondi Chicken in the Australian Bar at Bakewell, she’d gently quizzed him about his future. Cooper never found it difficult to listen to Liz. She didn’t take herself too seriously, and might burst out laughing at him at any moment. He treasured those moments, as a rule. But that evening, she’d been more serious.

And she had been right, he supposed. It was now or never, if he was ever going to go for promotion. Even if it meant some kind of horizontal development, a move to a different speciality – whatever it took to get noticed. You couldn’t stand still, or you moved backwards in this world. If he was going to settle down one day and have a family . . . Well that, after all, was what he would do, wasn’t it? If he was going to settle down, he couldn’t spend his life on a DC’s salary, growing cynical and grumpy, like Gavin Murfin. Putting on weight in all the wrong places, too, probably. Oh, damn.

His mother had always talked so much about her grandchildren – not only those who already existed, but those that were in the future, yet unborn. They had been the most important thing in her mind in those final years, even when the illness had taken most of her memories. Matt had done that for her, the older brother fulfilling the hopes and dreams. But Ben knew he had failed her. Maybe there was still time to make up for it, though. Still time to tell her that he had settled down, got the promotion, produced those grandchildren she’d talked about. He felt sure she would know, even now, wherever she was. If it mattered enough, you could make it happen.