‘Good,’ I said. ‘Because there’s someone I want you to find.’

‘Bob the Butcher,’ she said. ‘Because he broke your back. Because he made you the laughing stock of millions. And because he could have killed you if he wanted to.’

‘Not Bob,’ I said. ‘I don’t think Bob has anything to do with these murders. But the man I want to find just might. He would be somewhere in his mid thirties. Name of Edward Duncan.’

She found herself a pen. ‘Edward Duncan,’ she said as she wrote. ‘Do we have a date of birth?’

‘I can get you a possible one but I don’t want you to treat it like gospel.’

‘OK. What does he do, this Edward Duncan?’

‘He paints.’

‘Houses?’

‘Cities.’

‘Should I put it in the Action Book?’

I smiled at her. She wasn’t bored now.

‘This one’s off the book,’ I said.

As the afternoon grew colder and darker I stood on the edge of the ploughed field, watching twelve uniformed officers from the Specialist Search Unit inching across it on their hands and knees, fingertip-searching for evidence, the manual labour of police work.

A photographer was standing in the middle of the field staring at something on the ground. I walked over to him and we both looked at a dip in the field containing a single perfect footprint. On one side of it the photographer had placed a yellow marker with the number 1, and on the other side a plastic ruler. He hummed to himself, as cheerful as a wedding photographer, as he began setting up his tripod, lights and ladder.

‘Not you, is it?’ he grinned, nodding at the footprint.

‘I don’t think so,’ I said.

‘Well,’ he said, adjusting his tripod. ‘Maybe it’s the farmer’s wife. And maybe it’s our man. You never know your luck, do you?’

I agreed that you never knew your luck and headed towards the woods, my back aching in protest at being forced to cross a ploughed field.

The SSU van was parked just beyond the tree line and another dozen officers were sitting around it gulping down tea and bars of chocolate, their clothes filthy from the fingertip search, their exhausted faces as black with sweat-streaked dirt as coal miners’.

I came out of the trees and on to the playing fields of Potter’s Field. In the distance the wind whipped the flag of St George that flew above the main building. I’d just started towards it when I was caught by the smell of burning leaves. Smoke was drifting up from behind a tiny stone cottage at the edge of the rugby pitch. I walked round the back of it and found an old man unloading a wheelbarrow piled with dead leaves on to a small bonfire.

‘Excuse me, sir?’