Picture a room in a large Victorian house: a spacious, high-ceilinged first-floor bedroom that’s used as a study. There are overstuffed built-in bookshelves in this room, a pale blue and brown jukebox with curved edges that has a vintage look about it and is much more beautiful than the kind you sometimes see in pubs, an armchair, a filing cabinet, a long desk with square wooden legs and a green glass top that has a laptop computer at its center. The computer is neither open nor closed. Its lid is at a forty-five-degree angle, as if someone has tried halfheartedly to push it shut but it hasn’t gone all the way. The laptop is surrounded on all sides by cheap-looking pens, empty and half-empty coffee mugs, and scattered papers: handwritten notes, ideas jotted down.

Pushed back from the desk is a standard black office-style swivel chair, and lolling in the chair, his head leaning to the left, is a dead man. While alive, he was well known and—though this might well have nothing to do with anything—strikingly attractive in a stubbly, cowboy-without-a-hat kind of way. If I were to include his name in this account, I think most people would have heard of him. Some of you might shudder and say, “Oh, not that vile bigot!” or, more lightheartedly, “Not that ridiculous attention-seeker!” Others would think, “Oh, I love him—he says all the things I’m too scared to say.” Our dead body is (was) somebody who inspired strong feelings, you see. So strong that he got himself murdered.

How was he killed? Well, this is the interesting part. The murder process comprised several stages. First, he was immobilized. His arms were pulled behind the back of his chair and taped together at the wrists. The same was done to his ankles, which were taped together around the pole of the chair’s base, beneath the seat. Then his murderer stood behind him and brought a heavy object down on his head, rendering him unconscious. The police found this object on the floor beside the dead man’s desk: it was a metal kitchen-knife sharpener. It didn’t kill our well-known man (the pathologist told the police after examining the body), though it would have made an excellent murder-by-bludgeoning weapon, being more than heavy enough to do the job. However, it seems that although the killer was happy to use the knife sharpener to knock his victim out, he did not wish to use it to murder him.