‘At school,’ she said. ‘At Potter’s Field. He told me he was kicked in the eye when scoring a try. Hugo was a natural athlete.’ She sounded proud of him. ‘All those sports the English invented. Rugby. Cricket. Tennis. Football. They came easy to him.’

‘So it’s something that happened when he was a boy?’

Natasha Buck nodded. ‘He was very good at games.’

The next morning I left West End Central after our morning briefing and one hour later I was parking the X5 on a sweeping gravel drive and looking up at a large detached house. It felt like the countryside.

Adam Jones had fallen a long way, I thought, as a Filipina housekeeper let me in. She left me in the hall and I stared through glass doors at the back garden while I waited for the dead man’s mother.

There was a neglected swimming pool out there, the surface coated with dead leaves, and the huge garden was wild and overgrown. A fox dozed undisturbed on the far side of the pool, as if he knew that no gardener was coming round any time soon. The house felt abandoned. But there had been money here once. Maybe the money was still here. Maybe it wasn’t the money that had run out.

There was one painting on the wall. A shaft of dying sunlight striking the side of a skyscraper. It was a city street but the people had all gone home. It was clearly by the same artist as the one on the wall in Hugo Buck’s apartment. And there in the corner I found the same two lower-case initials:

j s

‘Thank you so much for coming,’ Mrs Jones said, coming down the stairs with her hands outstretched as if I was paying a social call.

I tried not to look shocked but I recognised the function of the colourful scarf she had tied around her head, and the pale, puffy look that comes with long months of intensive chemotherapy.

This lady was dying.

And yet there was an undeniable youthful beauty about her appearance. Under the headscarf, beyond the cancer and the chemo, there was an unlined face, preserved in time like some enchanted creature from a magic land.

‘Mrs Jones,’ I said. ‘I’m DC Wolfe. We spoke briefly on the phone.’ I offered my warrant card and she smiled at it politely. ‘Mrs Jones, I’m so sorry for the loss of your son.’

She flexed her mouth with a spasm of pain, nodded once and composed herself. She was a proud woman and determined not to show her heart to a man she would probably never see again.

‘Please,’ she said, gesturing towards the living room.