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his voice was surprisingly high-pitched for such a big, threatening looking man; his shaved hair and do-it-yourself tattoos making him look like an ageing football hooligan. Sean had found him pleasant enough and decided his appearance was probably deliberately crafted to keep the local yobs and criminals at bay. ‘Last bloke that came snooping around here was a detective superintendent or something, but I guess she’s not a priority anymore, eh?’
    ‘What?’ Sean asked, suddenly realizing he’d not been listening.
    ‘I said your lot used to send superintendents, now they send constables – since the bastard who killed her done himself in, and may his soul rot in hell by the way.’
    ‘If it was him,’ Sean said without thinking.
    ‘Sorry. I don’t follow.’
    Sean cleared his head. ‘It doesn’t matter.’
    ‘Whatever,’ the caretaker said with a shrug of his shoulders. ‘Take as long as you want. Just remember to drop the keys back when you’re done, although I don’t know what you expect to find – police and council cleared everything out months ago – to keep the ghouls and press away they told me. Anyway, I’ll leave you in peace – place gives me the bloody creeps.’
    Sean watched him shuffling away, huffing and puffing under his own weight, before he turned back to the flat, the darkness inside almost warning him not to go any further – warning him he would be consumed with the horror that still permeated the very walls of the interior. He’d covered a couple of sudden deaths as a probationary constable and one had even been a murder – a semi-vagrant kicked to death by his drinking friends. But this felt different – completely different, as if a pure evil had left its mark there. He felt the same presence he’d felt back in the park in Hither Green. The same malevolent force. He took a deep breath and stepped forward.
    The caretaker had been right – the inside was nothing more than a shell now. Everything that had made it a home was long gone. All that remained were the fixtures and fittings that were too big to remove: the built-in cupboards, kitchen cabinets, bath, sinks and toilet. Everything else was gone – even the carpets. But Sean could see them nonetheless, and he could see the blood – see the blood on the floor, the sofa, the table and surrounding chairs, the crime-scene photographs turning his mind into a projector for the images from the past.
    He walked along the narrow hallway, within a few steps reaching the doorways on both his right and left, causing him to pause. He pulled a copy of the confidential case file from an innocuous looking envelope and thumbed through it to the photographs that showed the flat how it was when the murder had first been discovered. He checked his orientation and deduced that the room on his left would have been the son’s room and the one on the right the kitchen. He checked the case file report – the killer had come in through a window Rebecca had left open in the kitchen.
Why had she done that? Was she trying to disperse the heat that had built up during the hot summer day, or was she trying to dispel the odours of cooking? It was a normal thing to do – something hundreds of thousands of others would have done on the very same day.
‘Only it cost her life.’ He suddenly found himself speaking out loud. He checked the file and the photographs again. She’d been attacked in the hallway initially, probably as she came across him as he walked from the kitchen. Blood spray patterns indicated he’d stabbed her in the stomach area and then dragged her to the lounge where he’d cut her throat with a large, extremely sharp-bladed instrument. It would have taken her only seconds to bleed to death.
Why didn’t you kill her straight away? The shock of being stabbed in the stomach would stop her from crying out, but why not kill her as soon as she found you? What were you waiting for?
Again he checked the file. After she’d bled to death