Patrick stood outside the phone booth and stamped his feet. It was freezing. Kevin Cosgrove had supposedly been picking up Mandy from outside a phone booth. It had been vandalised, that’s why she had begun to walk home. He pushed his hands deeper into the pockets of his overcoat. Gillian Enderby was at this moment on ice somewhere. Her parents were going through what he had gone through.

Later that night, as he lay in his bed, he wished that Kate was with him. He missed her. She was in her forties; she was dark when he had always had a preference for blondes; she was flat-chested and he had always liked his women to be well endowed; and to put the tin lid on it, she was a policewoman. In fact, she was the antithesis of everything he had ever said he wanted in a woman.

Yet he wanted her desperately.

Mandy and Gillian Enderby crawled once more into his troubled thoughts and finally he admitted defeat and got out of bed and went downstairs. He went to make himself a hot drink and took it back to bed after lacing it liberally with brandy.

Still he lay there, tossing and turning.

Kate, in her lonely bed, was doing exactly the same.

Willy was surprised to see Patrick up and dressed at six thirty and already on the telephone. He wondered briefly who he had got out of bed. After his own breakfast Patrick called him at seven fifteen and said he wanted to go to an address in East Ham. It was a council maisonette. Willy saw a man answer the door and then, after a brief exchange of words, saw Patrick go inside.

Curiouser and curiouser, he thought. Then he picked up his paper and began the process of looking at the semi-naked woman on page three once again.

Patrick introduced himself to Stan Enderby and the man invited him in. Enderby was about his own age but had not had the benefit of money. He looked older than his years, from the tobacco-stained fingers, the large beer belly and receding hairline to the impossibly thin roll-up clamped to the side of his mouth.

‘The wife’s upstairs, Mr Kelly. Took it bad, she has. Gilly was her pride and joy, you see. We never knew that she was . . . that she did what she did.’

Patrick followed him into a tiny front room that was sparsely furnished though very clean. He sat on the chair by the window and looked down briefly at his car.

‘Would you like a cup of tea, or something stronger?’ Stanley held up a bottle of cheap Tesco whisky and Patrick nodded his head in assent. He waited until the man gave him his glass.

‘Thank you.’