From there it was a non-stop trip to the terraced house on Portland Avenue that Anderson had once shared with his wife. He had remortgaged to buy her out, and bored every detective in the building with the details of the divorce more often than Porter cared to remember. The postage-stamp-size front garden overgrown with weeds, and faded green front door, suggested Anderson wasn’t exactly the house-proud type.

Porter checked his watch as Anderson fumbled with his key ring; quarter past five. He decided to give it until six, figuring the food would attract a visitor before it got cold. Whether it would be a visitor he gave a damn about was another matter. He was proved right less than ten minutes later. A woman walked past him and turned into Anderson’s path, if you could call a six-foot strip of cracked concrete a path. She wore jeans tight enough to restrict her to a totter rather than a walk, low-heeled black shoes and a gingerbread-brown leather jacket that stopped at the waist. It didn’t take a detective to work out this must be the new lady that Anderson had mentioned, the lingering kiss she gave him as he let her inside confirming it.

Porter cursed him under his breath and slapped a palm against the steering wheel. With a belly full of food and his lady-friend there, Anderson was going nowhere for the night. Why would the lazy bastard not play it straight? If he didn’t want to put the squeeze on his source, then why not at least let Porter have a crack? He might only have less than a fortnight left on the job, but Porter would be the one left holding whatever mess he left behind while Anderson waltzed off onto a golf course for the next twenty years.

The rumble in his stomach almost registered on the Richter scale, and he wondered if whatever culinary delight Styles had chosen for him would be on his desk or in someone else’s stomach. He glanced at his phone. He had flicked it onto silent when they went into Bolton’s health club and hadn’t switched the ringer back on. One missed call, one voicemail, both from Styles.

Porter looked over to Anderson’s house one more time, the curtains now drawn. He clipped the phone into his hands-free cradle, dialled Styles and pulled out onto the road. Anderson would keep until tomorrow.

Anderson looked like he hadn’t gotten much sleep, and Porter shuddered to think what the night might have entailed. He wore the same suit as yesterday, concertina folds across the bottom of the jacket from too many hours in a chair, and grunted a greeting at Porter as he passed.