And I saw that they were not men. These were boys who would be boys for perhaps one more summer. And despite the military uniforms, they were not real soldiers. Just students dressed as soldiers. Two of them looked like twins. One of them was the dead man on the far side of the desk. He had grown up to be a banker. He had grown up to be murdered.

I stood aside as a forensic photographer started taking pictures of the desk’s bloody mess.

‘Who would want to kill a banker?’ the photographer said.

It got a laugh. Mostly among the SOCOs, chuckling away behind their facemasks. Spend your life collecting microscopic samples of blood, semen and dirt and you are grateful for any laugh you can get. But the senior detective standing on the far side of the desk did not smile, although I could not tell if he had not heard the remark, or if he was preoccupied with the corpse before him, or if he disapproved of levity in the presence of death.

He was waiting patiently while a small man with a briefcase – the divisional surgeon, here to pronounce death – knelt over the body.

The detective’s large head was shaved so clean it shined, and despite his extravagantly broken nose – and it had been broken so often that it looked like a wonky ski run – he had enough vanity to keep his pale goatee beard neatly trimmed.

He turned his piercing blue eyes on me and I thought that he looked like a Viking. I could imagine that pale, fierce face coming up the beach for a spot of pillaging and monk bothering. But Vikings didn’t wear glasses and the detective’s were round and rimless, John Lennon Imagine specs; they softened his ferocious appearance and gave his hard face a kindly, slightly perplexed expression.

My new boss.

‘DC Wolfe, sir,’ I said.

‘Ah, our new man,’ he said, the quiet voice precise and clipped with the vowels of the distant north, Aberdeen or beyond, the kind of Highlands accent that sounds as if every word is carved from granite. ‘I’m DCI Mallory.’

I already knew his name. I had never met him before but I had heard of him enough. Detective Chief Inspector Victor Mallory was one of the reasons I wanted the transfer to Homicide and Serious Crime Command.

We were both wearing thin blue gloves and made no attempt to reach across the desk and shake hands. But we smiled, and took a second to size each other up.

DCI Mallory looked very fit, not just for a man in his early fifties but for a man of any age, and it looked like the kind of fitness that comes from natural athleticism rather than hours in the gym. He watched me with his blue eyes as the divisional surgeon fussed briskly over the corpse.