She deposited her holdall in the only gap she could find on the living room carpet and picked her way carefully through the debris towards the kitchen. It was the same story here: cupboards and drawers stood open, their contents pushed to one side or lying smashed on the floors. The only place that seemed to have escaped was the fridge. She stood there with the fridge door open, momentarily contemplating whether it would be wise to pour herself a large glass of white wine before she rang the police. Suddenly she heard a movement from somewhere behind her. It was followed swiftly by the clatter of a door smashing against a wall. She turned and scrambled over the top of the intervening detritus and down the hallway. She got to the top of the steps just in time to see the silhouette of a tall figure sprinting down the street and turning into the side alley a few doors down. There was no way she’d catch them. And she wasn’t sure she’d have any idea what to do if she did.

Clare had no notion what the normal routine was when reporting a burglary to the police, but things being what they were these days she was half expecting the woman on the other end of the line to issue her with a crime number and tell her to get on with it. So it came as something of a surprise when a female police officer accompanied by a forensics team had turned up within little more than an hour. It had, as they later explained to her, been an unusually quiet couple of days in Salisbury.

She’d been told not to touch anything, but she hadn’t been able to resist checking out the bedrooms to see what sort of a state they were in. And to her relief she’d discovered that, though the contents of the boxes from Stephen’s study had suffered the same fate as the rest of the flat, her bedroom had at least been spared. She must have disturbed them before they’d got that far.

And that was where she was sitting now, perched awkwardly on the end of the bed alongside the policewoman.

‘And as far as you can tell, that’s the only thing that’s been taken.’

Clare said, ‘Well, it’s difficult to say for sure but the TV’s still here, the iPod is still sitting in its dock in the living room and I had my work laptop with me. So yes, as far as I can tell I think it’s just my husband’s old laptop that they’ve taken. But I can’t imagine they’ll get much for it.’

‘And there’s no jewellery missing?’