She was pushing me out of the apartment and I was letting her. And I saw that she was as stupid as me. Another mug.

‘You’re wrong about everything,’ she said, closing the door in my face.

In the morning, just inside the communal front door of our block of flats, half covered with flyers for pizza, there was a package waiting on the mat with my name on it.

As Stan sniffed at the junk mail, I tore the package open and pulled out a VHS videotape. It felt cheap, plastic, rickety. Incredibly old-fashioned. I looked at the spine. There was printed felt-tip writing, written very carefully, as if by a bright child.

Our 1st XV v Harrow 1st XV 10-10-88

I searched inside. No note. I looked back at the VHS I was holding, then down at the dog.

‘How am I meant to play this?’ I said out loud.

‘Vice,’ Wren told me when I got to work. ‘Down on the third floor. Vice has video recorders from back in the day.’

MIR-1 was still deserted. Wren always got in early.

‘I’ve been looking on HOLMES for missing persons,’ she said. ‘I started with female mispers between the ages of fifteen and thirty within a ten-mile radius of Potter’s Field in 1988.’

‘Keep looking.’

‘I will – but you need to talk to the SIO,’ she said. ‘You need to talk to Mallory. About what James Sutcliffe said before he died.’ A beat. ‘About the school.’

‘Mallory has the chief super breathing down his neck. And the chief super is anxious to protect Ben King.’

‘You still need to talk to him.’

I looked at the VHS tape in my hand.

‘I know,’ I said. ‘But what did Sutcliffe really tell us? We don’t even know who we’re talking about, do we? Who was in that room?’

‘He told us enough,’ Wren said. ‘They’re not dying because they’re rich, are they? They’re not dying because they’re sons of privilege or symbols of social injustice or any of that Bob the Butcher stuff.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘They’re dying because of the past.’

We found a quiet corner of Vice with a couple of dusty video recorders and settled down to watch our videotape.

All around us young men and women were watching writhing bodies on their computer screens, and trying to separate standard filth from criminal obscenity that was likely to corrupt and deprave.

‘Is that vulva open?’ said one young man.

‘I think it’s only slightly ajar,’ said a young woman.

‘Definitely a grey area,’ said the young man, making a note.

They were friendly enough but neither Wren or I knew any of the twenty-something officers in the department.

‘They change personnel every six months down here,’ Wren whispered. ‘In case it does something to their sex drive. One way or the other.’