It’s strange how other people’s deaths can take you, sometimes. You can build up as much scar tissue as you like - and I’d say I’ve got more than the average allocation, one way and another - but death can still sneak up on you from an unexpected angle and twist your guts.

The murdered woman had been trying to get out of her tiny little studio flat by means of the window. She’d probably been surprised in bed: woken from sleep to find the intruder already in her room. At any rate, the sheets and the duvet had spilled onto the floor, spread out along a more or less straight line between the bed and the point where she’d died.

A lot of the woman had spilled onto the floor, too. A crude wooden javelin of some kind - most likely the broken-off leg of a table - had passed through her lower abdomen with enough force to drive itself several inches into the plaster of the wall below the window. She remained impaled on it, slumped forward against the glass, one hand dangling at her side. The other hand was raised as though to reach for the latch, but it had come to rest on the sill instead.

A carpet of blood spread out from the body on all sides across the cheap yellow linoleum, setting off the death scene from the rest of the room.

She was a Caucasian woman, as the papers would no doubt put it, in her thirties, with a consciously retro-styled white Afro: tall but very slender of build, to the point where some of her friends might have worried that she was anorexic. The tabloids would probably add, with their usual eye for salacious detail, that she was naked except for a pink baby-doll nightie too short to hide her modesty. She looked vulnerable and pathetic, transformed into a tableau in the course of her undignified flight, brought down from behind by whatever it was she was running from.

Apart from that disconcerting centrepiece, the room was pretty forgettable. The decor was of the kind that says in many subtle ways, ‘I rent this room and I couldn’t give a toss what it looks like.’ The Georgian-green paint was okay, if you like goose turds, but the dirty, smudged aureoles around the light switches and plug sockets gave a reliable measure of how long ago the paint job had been done, and how many indifferent tenants had passed this way since. The only picture on the wall was a washed-out sub-Constable landscape of haystacks at harvest time, standing underneath a cloudless blue sky. A handsome young farmer walked away from the viewer, his pitchfork resting lightly on his shoulder, the muscles of his bare arms artlessly exaggerated. Give him a pair of chaps, pull his pants down a notch to show some arse cleavage and it could be gay porn.