The water was through my shoes and soaking my feet. I felt an icy calm descend on me as I remembered how to open a locked door quickly. I took a step back to give myself room and kicked the lock as hard as I could. The door flew open with a crack of metal and wood and I saw one of Waugh’s long white arms hanging over the side of the bath, fresh blood pouring from the open veins on his wrists, staining the side of the bathtub and the white tiles of the floor with long crimson streaks.

There were soft white towels on heated rails and in little piles stacked neatly under the sink. I snatched them up and, sliding on the sopping floor, pressed them against his open wrists, and tied them tight around his limp white arms, and then threw them aside and started all over again when, in what seemed like seconds, his blood soaked through.

I was screaming and cursing and calling for help as I pressed the towels against the open veins of Peregrine Waugh. It was only when I ran out of towels that I saw the lifeblood had drained from his body, that his eyes were staring at the ceiling without seeing. I stood there with no breath and no strength to move until I finally remembered to turn off the hot and cold running water.

In the sudden silence the only sound was the boys down on the playing fields and, from the room behind me, the subdued sobbing of a grown man.

‘Open it up,’ DCI Whitestone said.

By now the December night was cold and black but the lamps of the SOCOs encircled the tomb and drenched it in blazing light. A bitter wind whipped through the graveyard, rustling dead leaves and the poppies that someone had swept from the grave.

A forklift truck was slightly tilted on the slope of the old graveyard, and it seemed to rock dangerously as its long metal fork eased beneath the grey stone of Henry’s tomb.

The Murder Investigation Team from West End Central stood just behind the SOCOs, their mufti evidence of their interrupted weekends. Whitestone was in a parka thrown over jeans and T-shirt, as if she had come straight from home. Gane was in a tracksuit, as if he had come straight from the gym. And Edie Wren was in a short dress and killer heels and complicated hair, as if she had come straight from seeing her married man, or maybe trying to forget about him.

I saw the chief super exchanging words with Sergeant Lane of Potter’s Field, their faces ghost-like in the fierce artificial light.