Police forensics officers wearing white plastic disposables over their street clothes, white gloves on their hands and white masks on their faces were measuring, sampling, dusting, scraping, labelling, correlating, flower-arranging: the room was a hive of activity, as though the dead woman was hosting a party where all the guests were pallid ghosts.

I turned away from the corpse, set my back to it resolutely, although that didn’t still the toxic stew of contradictory emotions that was slopping around inside me. It was a hot, moist armpit of a night, from which the heat of the day had barely begun to fade, and the small room was filled like a cup with the stink of spilled blood and split bowels.

Gary Coldwood, a copper to his fingertips, fixed me with an expectant glance. I shook my head. I knew what it was that he was expecting and I wasn’t up to it just yet.

‘Who found her?’ I asked him.

‘Bloke in the flat below,’ Gary said. ‘Nervous type. Highly strung. The call-in was mainly him screaming for the best part of a minute before the switchboard operator could get the address out of him. We’ve got him downstairs now. The Basilisk is taking his statement.’

The Basilisk. That would be Coldwood’s sometime partner, sometime nemesis, Ruth Basquiat: Miss Blonde Ambition. Not the first person I’d have chosen to take a statement from a poor sod who was still traumatised from seeing his upstairs neighbour crucified against her own bedroom wall.

‘Anyone see anything?’ I pursued. ‘Hear anything?’

Gary breathed out loudly: it was almost a snort. ‘Welcome to Brixton,’ he said. ‘Home of the three wise monkeys: see no evil, hear no evil and I fought the law. Even the gent downstairs didn’t pick up the phone until the blood started dripping through his ceiling.’

‘So who was she?’

Gary consulted his notes. He knew I was stalling, but he also knew when to push and when it was best just to lead me to water and wait for me to drink. He was looking tired, his bristling unibrow wilting on his forehead like a caterpillar caught on bare scrub. There was a downward set to his broad, muscular frame, as though the local gravity where he was standing was two or three times Earth normal. I guessed it had already been a long night, and wasn’t likely to end any time soon.