‘The fingerprints on the throat were a telling little detail,’ Coldwood ruminated. ‘I mean, given that the cause of death wasn’t strangulation. It ties in with what you said about him being in here with her for a long time. He held her by the throat, but he wasn’t trying to kill her. Not straight away.’

‘You don’t know that.’

Gary was measuring angles with his eye, his head turning to the bed, to the window, back to the bed. ‘Yes, we do,’ he said absently. ‘Well, if it’s Ditko we do. Because he could have snapped her neck one-handed in half a second. He might have been giving her a shiatsu massage, or intimidating her, or feeling for a pulse, or doing pretty much anything else, but the one thing he wasn’t doing right then was killing her. So . . .’

He paced out the distance from the corpse to the bed, walking around the tangle of bedclothes.

‘So there was something else,’ I finished. ‘Something he did first. Or tried to do.’

‘Makes sense, doesn’t it?’ Gary knelt at the head of the bed, staring at the headboard. I’d only just noticed that there was blood on it, and on the pillows beneath it. ‘What do you make of this?’ he asked, pointing.

I thought of the emotions - recent, strong - that hung in the air of the room like a visible fog. Fear had been the most vivid of all, but hope had been in the mix too. Ginny Parris knew what Rafi was now: who he bunked with. But at least once after she woke up and realised she wasn’t alone in the room, she had thought she might make it out of this alive. What did that mean? That she saw Rafi, as well as Asmodeus? Spoke to him?

I tried to piece it together in my mind.

‘He was holding her still,’ I said tentatively. ‘Maybe while he talked to her.’

‘About what?’

‘No idea. Maybe I’m barking up the wrong tree. But whatever they were doing, he started to get angry. The blood on the headboard means she was injured here, right?’

‘Lesion to the back of the head. Lots of superimposed lacerations.’ Gary smacked the back of one hand into the palm of the other. ‘Bang, bang, bang. Then he lets go of her, and she runs. But for the window. Why not the door?’

I ignored the question because I was still thinking about the previous one. If it was Rafi - Asmodeus - then what would he want to talk to Ginny about? Would she still have connections among Fanke’s all-American satanists? Fanke himself was dead, but did she still subscribe to the newsletter? Attend the AGM? Was he shaking her down for a phone number or an address? That didn’t feel right, somehow. Surely Asmodeus would have better ways of making contact with the necromantic fraternity than dropping in on Rafi’s ex? And if he wanted to send a message, he’d probably have had enough self-control not to shoot the messenger.