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’

‘All you need for what, Castor?’

‘Sorry, Gary. Client privilege.’

He shook his head. ‘You’re full of shit in an amazing variety of different shades and textures.’

‘Seriously,’ I persisted. ‘All I need are the basics, nothing that would compromise your professional integrity by even half an inch.’ I pointed at one of the tubercles sticking out of the heart. ‘You missed that one,’ I added helpfully.

‘I didn’t miss it,’ Coldwood muttered. ‘I just didn’t get to it yet. You want me to give you a walk-through of the whole case? Seriously? And you don’t think that would compromise m Smpru we?’ The emphasis he put on the word was unnecessarily sarcastic.

I could see that I was rubbing him up the wrong way.

‘Okay, Gary,’ I said. ‘Just meet me halfway, then. You know you want to. Deep down you’re still feeling guilty because you let me get arrested for murder that time, and then stood there and watched while Basquiat beat the crap out of me.’

‘No,’ he said, drawing in the little additional piece of cardiac plumbing.

‘I’m not feeling guilty, because that whole Abbie Torrington business was your own damn fault. And if I remember rightly you got yourself out of arrest again in very short order. By driving an ambulance through the front wall of the Whittington Hospital, wasn’t it?’

‘I wasn’t driving.’

‘Point stands.’

Coldwood straightened up and looked at his drawing with a critical eye: apparently it passed muster, because he put the pencil down. I thought I could see a couple of other oozy bits of anatomy that he hadn’t captured in his lightning sketch, but maybe they didn’t matter from a policing point of view.

Coldwood’s evening class in forensic science is his latest attempt to get ahead of the baying pack down at Albany Street and make Inspector while he’s still young enough to enjoy it. He goes up to Keighley College two nights a week, gets day release once a fortnight and in theory comes out in a couple of years’ time with a BTEC Higher, which he’ll happily wave in the face of the aforementioned Detective Sergeant Basquiat – a willowy blonde with a pixie-ish disregard for interrogation protocol.

In the meantime he spends his free time slicing up internal organs that don’t – anatomically speaking – belong to him.

‘You don’t have a murder weapon,’ I said, deciding to go for a direct approach. Sometimes there’s such a thing as being too subtle.

‘We’ll find it. We still think Hunter ditched it in between leaving the Paragon and being picked up.