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’

‘Ditched it where? Out on the street?’

‘Maybe, yeah. Or maybe in the boot of a car. Or in a skip behind a shop. It’s a bloody claw hammer, Fix – with a two-and-a-half-inch cross-section on the blunt end. We’ll know it when we see it.’

‘What if you don’t find it? Are you prepared to admit the possibility that there was someone else in that hotel room?’

Coldwood rolled his eyes and shook his head in something like disgust. He picked up the dish and overturned it, letting the heart slide out and fall into his pedal bin.

‘About a thousand someone elses,’ he scoffed. ‘You know the kind of place we’re talking about. Revolving doors, hot and cold running whores. They’re in and out of there like Tom and effing Jerry. We picked up three dozen sets of prints on the bedposts alone.’

‘I’m talking about someone who might not have left any prints,’ I said quietly.

That got his full attention. He wagged a finger at me, nodding to indicate that he got it now. ‘Oh, right. This is Janine Hunter’s vengeful-ghost theory, is it?’ he said derisively.

‘Myriam Kale, back from the dead. How did she get to England? Through the phone lines?’

‘You will admit, though,’ I pressed on regardless, ‘that without a weapon most of your evidence is circumstantial . . .’

‘Circumstantial?’ Coldwood was incredulous. ‘DNA evidence from an anal rape?’

‘Rape’s a question of interpretation – especially if you walk into a bedroom in a knocking shop and lock the door behind you. But in any case we’re talking about the murder, not the sex.

’

‘Look at the autopsy report and tell me it’s all interpretation,’ Coldwood suggested. ‘Barnard had been beaten, burned, buggered and bent backwards. Then he’d been tenderised with a fucking hammer. Whether he went into that room for sex or not, I think it’s pretty fair to assume that very little of what was done to him was as per tariff.’

I was fighting a rearguard action here, but I wasn’t ready to give up just yet. ‘Burned?’ I repeated. ‘You mean on his face? According to Jan Hunter, that happened after he was killed, not—’

Coldwood waved the objection away.

‘Don’t trip me up with semantics, Fix. This isn’t a courtroom. Look, we can place Hunter in the area. We can place him in the room. We can place him – excuse my language – up Barnard’s arse. What more do you want?’

He turned his back on me, pulling a generous length of kitchen towel from a rack on the wall and wiping his gory hands on it. ‘We’ve done our homework,’ he went on.