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‘Also, judging by the stain and clean-up patterns, there was a lot of it. A lot lot. At least a litre. This wasn’t a simple nick on the neck while shaving.

You were right on this one, Gareth, I have to hand it to you,’ she said, sounding half impressed, and half slightly vexed. Cis did always like to be right.

Part of me did feel vindicated. So, it was a murder. But I couldn’t also shake this nauseous, guilty feeling, as if I was never meant to have this sense of satisfaction – that, in fact, I was delving deeper into a rabbit hole I wasn’t meant to go down.

Or then again, maybe it was the kebab.

‘But you’ll love this,’ Cis said, with a wry smile.

Cis passed me her phone. I stopped walking to take a clearer look at the image. A piece of scrappy A4 paper, encased in a plastic pocket. The writing was sketchy and hard to read, but I could just about make it out:

I’ll kill you.

‘I think you’re missing the bit above,’ Cis remarked as she extended her fingers to zoom in on the phone screen. Sure enough, above the bolded ‘I’ll kill you’ there was some fainter writing.

Stay away from her or…

‘Well, did O’Neill write this to send to someone, or was someone sending it to him?’ I asked.

‘We haven’t found any other handwriting from him yet, so we’re looking into it, but it’s weird, right?’

Most of the crimes I had been assigned to already had a culprit attached.

The hit-and-run had been a joyriding teenager.

The petrol station incident had been an unhinged husband who’d finally snapped.

As the cliché goes: if you are going to be murdered, you more than likely already know who’s going to kill you.

But Mr O’Neill didn’t seem to have still been in touch with anyone.

‘Nothing was taken, so it wasn’t a burglary attempt,’ I said, trying to make sense of it all by speaking aloud.

‘The whole thing feels like a…’ I tried to articulate a way to explain it.

‘Like a spontaneous act of violence. Like someone just walked in one day and decided they were going to kill poor old Mr O’Neill.

Almost like it was some kind of impulse killing. ’

I took a glance at Cis, who was currently in a mid–deep inhale.

‘What do you think about all of this?’ I asked.

‘I think it was personal,’ Cis said rather bluntly.

We stood there for a bit longer, both processing everything, when a message pinged through on my phone.

‘What is it?’ Cis asked. I read and reread the message as she waited for me to explain myself.

‘Darren says that Beryl – one of our neighbours, she lives just across the street from us – has one of those video doorbells.’

‘Oh?’ Cis said, her eyes lighting up. ‘So, there might be footage of O’Neill’s house.’

‘There’s a chance, but some devices only start recording when they detect someone nearby, so we can’t be sure we’ll find anything useful.

Also’ – I couldn’t help but scoff – ‘Fran, of all people, told me she managed to break it while walking Beryl’s dog.

And Beryl? She’s flipping clueless about where the footage is sent.

She doesn’t even have the app on her phone.

Darren mentioned he’s attempting to reach her son, citing high police importance, as he seems to be the only one capable of accessing the video. ’

‘Christ alive. Even in the suburbs, we’re always being watched, right?’ Cis muttered, her gaze scanning around to spot any cameras that might be observing us while I tried to ignore that she had taken the Lord’s name in vain.

‘And don’t you feel much safer?’ I said flippantly, resting a hand on my stomach, which had begun to feel queasy again.

I couldn’t help but let out a small guttural belch that was luckily covered by the loud blaring of Cis’s phone ringing, which she instantly snatched out of her pocket and slapped against her face.

I tried to make out the tinny voice on the other end of the line before she gestured to me to turn around and head back to the house.

Cis being Cis meant she went straight into power-walk mode, whereas I was staggering pathetically behind her, hoping the nausea would pass.

A member of the forensic team spotted us as we approached Mr O’Neill’s.

He motioned us to suit up and enter the house.

Theo, who I identified by his name tag (they all wore them, for obvious reasons), led us up the stairs.

The house aroma had completely shifted from the scent of pensioner to sterile liquids and fresh-out-of-the-box polyethylene.

‘The attic was padlocked, so we used the bolt croppers,’ Theo said to us as he waved to the ladder for us to ascend. ‘Can see why he didn’t want anyone getting in.’

I clambered up the ladder first, lifting the small compartment door to the side as I raised my torso up onto the flooring and scooted my legs up. I offered a hand to Cis. But Action Woman easily yanked herself up like it was nothing.

‘Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, it stinks to high heaven up here,’ Cis exclaimed, causing me to yet again grit my teeth at her blasphemy as she carefully began to tiptoe around the attic. Only a small, cheap bulb illuminated the space from total darkness.

‘It’s mould,’ I heard one of the forensic team say. ‘Lots and lots of mould.’

At first, I found nothing particularly odd about the attic, but as my eyes adjusted to the darkness I made out countless cardboard boxes sprawled all across the space.

I took a step forward, trying to avoid the attic insulation as Theo scurried up the ladder and joined us.

‘Now I’m going to guess, there is a lot of paperwork he didn’t want people to see,’ he said, ‘not many people lock their attics.’

‘There I was, imagining Mr O’Neill as this kind old recluse, like that crotchety man from that balloon house film,’ Cis said.

She turned around to check on me, giving me the thumbs up in the form of a question, to which I replied in kind.

I took a glance at one of the boxes. Finances 1988–1990 was etched in pen on the side, along with furry green mould that reached across the cardboard.

‘I read about this,’ I said as I began to open up the box. ‘Successful businessman, lost it all and then set up a community foundation to give back.’ I yanked out a very 80s-looking folder and began to drift through the pages of invoices, receipts, correspondence.

‘Ah yes, businessmen and their guilty consciences,’ Cis remarked.

‘Huh,’ I said to myself, as my perusing was cut short by an End-of-Year Report 1988. ‘What kind of company goes under when they’re making far more money than they’re spending?’

‘That’s just a successful business,’ Cis commented.

I flicked over to the next page. A letter with the very clear and unmistakable House of Commons insignia at the top, with the subject line ‘Our Burgeoning Partnership’, from an Abe Clark.

The next page was even more surprising: a handwritten letter whose legibility had been worn away over time, but at the top, the letterhead was the Office of the Metropolitan Police.

It was only as I held the paper to the light that I could make out just one phrase in what was quite frankly terrible handwriting:

They’ll never suspect a thing, I promise.

A feeling began to creep over me – a feeling that could be best described as dread. As if I had just waded into the deep end before I really knew how to swim.

I felt my throat begin to clench and my stomach to convulse as I crouched down to take a closer look. My stomach lurched, and I found myself charging back down the ladder again to try to expel the kebab and what else was left in my belly.

‘Oh Jesus!’ I shouted.

Yes, I know, I know.

‘Outside! Outside!’ I heard one of the forensic team members call after me.