At that point, belatedly, I registered something else that Gary had said. ‘One reason why I’m here?’ I echoed. ‘Why? What’s the other?’

‘All in good time,’ Coldwood said, his expression studiously neutral. ‘There’s another wrinkle to this one, but I don’t want to prejudice your findings. Now are you going to do that voodoo that you do tolerably well, or shall we all stand around while you carry on throwing guesses at the fucking wall?’

‘Oh, handle me roughly, Detective Sergeant,’ I said in a bored drawl. Gary and me have a certain amount of history now: we’re even friends, in a way, although it’s a friendship with arcane rules about when we cut each other slack and when we don’t. We have default roles and positions that we tend to fall into when we meet. Right now, that was a useful bulwark against the splatter-shot blood-red reality behind me.

I looked round at the busy-bee forensics team, who were still doing their labour-intensive thing on all sides of us, and the small herd of uniformed constables loitering around the doorway.

‘You’ll need to clear the room,’ I told Gary. ‘I won’t be able to pick up a blind thing with this lot going on.’

Gary hesitated, then nodded. ‘Mandatory fag break,’ he called out to his team. ‘Collins, work on the stairwell for a bit. Webb, get some of your mob taking statements from the neighbours. I can see them all rubbernecking out there, so we might as well use them while we’ve got them.’ He pointed towards the door. ‘Everybody out.’

They left in dribs and drabs, the forensics guys packing up their kit with finicky care and looking glumly frustrated, as though they’d been smacked in the head with a wet fish in the middle of some promising sexual foreplay. A case like this doesn’t come along every day: although as far as that goes, they probably only had to wait. Things were changing around us, faster and faster. The world wasn’t a sphere any more, or at least it didn’t feel that way a lot of the time; it felt like an inclined plane.

Gary was the last to leave, and he lingered in the doorway. ‘I don’t have to tell you not to touch anything, do I, Fix?’ he asked, his expression hovering somewhere between wary and apologetic.