‘Step back, miss. We’re making an entry with hoses. The area needs to be clear.’

Connie did as she was told. She retraced her steps to a distance behind the fire engines but stayed within the police cordon. Dr Ross’ description of a man presenting himself with Cotard’s delusion over the course of three years and matching the rough physical description of the man they were hunting was reason enough to have come here. The fact that the property was on fire, just a day after Elspeth had been outed as an adulterer, couldn’t be a coincidence.

The blinding glow from the first-floor windows indicated either that the flames had penetrated the hallway and up the stairs, or that the ceiling had caved in. Probably both. She wondered how long the fire had been raging, but there was no one around to ask. She’d never been so close to a house fire before. The different odours were cloying and sickly. The chemicals that made the furniture, fittings and possessions combined to render the air hard to breathe.

If there were people still inside, how long would it take for them to perish from smoke inhalation? There was an ambulance on the scene already, not that paramedics would be able to assist if Fergus Ariss had decided to use a house fire as a mechanism for disposing of evidence and destroying the corpses. If Fergus Ariss was even the man they were looking for.

Water was being blasted into the ground floor now, and clouds of thick grey smoke were hissing out in response. Connie turned her face away and put her sleeve over her mouth. A firefighter raced out of the property towards a vehicle and began to unload two lengths of rope, a large axe, a saw, and a flashlight. He was joined by a colleague, who took the tools and ran back inside.

‘Did you see anyone?’ she yelled, but they were gone already.

Connie knew when to stay out of the way and shut up. She wasn’t going to see anything for a few minutes. In the meantime, all she could do was find out more about the property.

The front door, only partially obscured from the road, wasn’t a safe enough bet for moving bodies from a car boot into the house. A passing tractor or dog walker could easily see too much. That meant there had to be another access to the property for a car to draw up. Connie skirted around the edge of the garden fence and made her way around to find the back door.