Standing on the threshold of The Lamb, Sergeant Tom West took a last drag on his fag before surreptitiously flicking it into the gutter. He’d spent most of the last three days trawling through the CCTV footage from every camera between Jack Tyler’s flat and The Market Place in Devizes. And there were more of them than he’d ever imagined possible. If his missus wanted to watch the box tonight she could bloody well do it on her own. But square-eyed though he might now be, he felt an inner glow of satisfaction. His persistence had finally paid off.

Checking through Tyler’s bank account, it was obvious he’d been in money trouble. And West had discovered that he’d flogged his car a few weeks ago. Given the amount of alcohol still in his system when he’d been found and the bowl of vomit lying in the middle of the living-room floor, it didn’t take Sherlock Holmes to work out that he must have been out on the tiles the night before he died.

He’d had a hunch that without a car Tyler’s favoured watering hole wasn’t likely to be far from home. So he’d asked Sally Treen if he could spend some time trawling through the CCTV footage in the area. She’d made it clear she thought he’d be on a hiding to nothing. Nine out of ten times shops and pubs either had dummy cameras up or they wiped the footage every few days. Tyler’s neighbours claimed to have heard voices sometime after midnight, but nothing after that. There was absolutely no sign of a murder weapon and SOCO had found bugger all else of any use by way of forensic evidence. So in the end, as it was his time he was wasting, Sally had agreed.

He’d eventually struck lucky when he’d picked up an image of Jack Tyler staggering into the appropriately named Snuff Street from The Market Place on Thursday night. According to Frank Barlow, he’d died sometime on Friday morning.