I nodded. It was one of my favourites and I’d lent it to him not long after we started working together. The book was based around the legal principle that you take your victim as you find them. If you punched someone in the head and they had a skull as fragile as an eggshell and they died, it was your fault, even if the extent of harm would be less in an ‘average’ person.

Wozza was on a roll. Reading was good for him. ‘So, if these guys have drugged random drinks around the pub and Merv drank one of them …’

‘They murdered him,’ I finished.

‘They did indeed!’ Wozza said. ‘This investigation just bumped up a notch.’

When Jane radioed to tell us the Crime Scene techs were packing up, Wozza and I headed back to Merv’s house.

Putting on a pair of gloves for the second time that day, I stepped back inside Merv’s grimy kitchen. He was still lying on the kitchen floor, waiting for the government undertaker. I went past the kitchen and down the hallway to the bathroom. I needed to check out his medicine cabinet. It was a mirrored door above the bathroom sink. With some resistance, it finally opened. In keeping with the rest of the place, the three shelves inside were dirty and encrusted from years of never being cleaned. They were almost bare aside from half a packet of disposable razors and a generic-brand can of shaving cream and deodorant. There was a cracked cake of yellow soap that looked older than Merv. I closed the door and caught sight of myself in the mirror. It was smudged, but even so, I looked tired. Needed an early night.

‘Antigone?’ Wozza called from somewhere in the house.

‘Yep?’

‘The medication is in here. Bedroom.’

I followed my partner’s voice and stepped into a dark musty bedroom further down the hall. ‘Whatcha got?’

‘He keeps his medication by the bed.’ Wozza stood aside to reveal a small bedside chest of drawers. On the top were half-a-dozen bottles of pills, all with Filmore’s Pharmacy labels.

From where I stood, one looked like aspirin and the others looked prescription.

‘Tegretol?’

‘Yep.’ Wozza indicated one of the bottles with his gloved pointer finger.

‘Find anything else of interest?’ I asked.

‘Nothing you want to know about,’ he said.

I shuddered and returned to the kitchen.

There was an old mobile phone on the bench plugged into a charger. No passcode required. There was a list of numbers called and calls received. No one had called since Thursday afternoon. I bagged phone and charger. We could check the numbers against ones we knew and see who Merv had been speaking to. I’d bet London to a brick that one of those numbers belonged to Jack Barratt.