‘She runs,’ I agreed. ‘And he kills her. Without a second thought. So either he’s already got what he came for by this time, or else he knows it’s not here. Or maybe he’s lost interest. Anyway, for whatever reason, it’s game over now. He . . .’ I didn’t finish the sentence. I just nodded toward the broken table.

‘We’re three storeys up,’ Gary persisted. ‘I don’t know why she didn’t head for the door.’

‘He was between her and the door,’ I pointed out, but that was only half the answer. She knew she couldn’t fall forty feet to the ground and walk away. She didn’t care. She had to get out of this room, and away from the thing that had come for her. Even death must have seemed better than the alternative right then. No, cancel that: death was on the cards either way. She just wanted to meet it on her own terms, without any help from the thing that was wearing her former lover like a glove puppet.

The opening bars of Beethoven’s ‘Für Elise’ sounded in the room. Gary fished about in his pocket and came up with his mobile.

‘Hello?’ he said into the phone, and then, ‘Right. Thanks. Keep me posted.’ The voice at the other end of the line gabbled, sounding - as voices at the other end of the line always do - like a sound effect from a 1940s Looney Tunes cartoon. Gary frowned. ‘What? What’s that supposed to mean? Well put him on then. No. No, I’m still at the effing crime scene. I’ll come in when I’m done here, not before.’

He lowered the phone and put it back where it came from. ‘That was the lab,’ he said. ‘It’s Ditko all right.’

‘Asmodeus,’ I corrected automatically. I was already so sure it was him that I felt no surprise, just a faint sense of increased pressure weighing down on me, as though my invisible bathysphere had descended another hundred feet or so into the shit soup that now surrounded us.

‘Listen, I’ve got to get back to Uxbridge Road nick,’ Gary said. ‘Some tosspot from SOCA has popped up and started throwing his weight around. Says he wants to review the case. I’ve got to slap the cheeky sod down before he gets his feet under the table.’

He headed for the door, and I followed him.

‘You want a lift?’ he asked.

I thought about that. It was a long way home, and the last Tube train had gone more than an hour ago. It would have been easy to say yes. But I had a lot to think about, and I wanted to shake off the atmosphere of that room by walking in the clean air.

‘No thanks,’ I said. ‘I’m good. Gary, keep me in the loop, yeah? I know Asmodeus better than anyone. If you get a lead on where he is, count me in.’