3.

The next thirty minutes are spent with the logistics of death. Get a duty officer up from Neath, the divisional surgeon from Cardiff, a SOCO – scene of the crime officer – up from Swansea. It’s Dunwoody’s job to do those things really, but I find myself doing most of it. I keep him in the loop, more or less. He promises to come over ‘soon as I can’. I ask him to get a full set of phone records from the phone provider. Also bank records. Also any medical and social services records. I’d do it myself except those things are easier to do from the office.

I also speak to Jon Breakell, who says T.M. Baron has been traced to an address in Leicester.

‘And you’re going to tell me that Dunwoody has got some uniforms kicking down the doors.’

‘Not exactly, but this kind of changes things, I guess.’

‘Just a bit.’

I hang up.

I’m parked just below the cattle grid, but within sight of the open moorland. From where I am, I can count six sheep, but there will be dozens more, roaming the hill, cropping the grass, disturbing the grouse and the pipits, the skylarks and the plovers. There are enough sheep on this hill to feed a family for years. Hayley Morgan died as next season’s roast dinner grazed the verge beyond her kitchen window.

There’s only one road up to the cottage and when a clean blue Passat noses its way up the road, I travel with it. The Passat discharges one SOCO, Gavin Jones, and a plump Detective Sergeant, who turns out to be Bob Shelton, the duty officer from Neath. Jones has a porn star moustache, sprinkled with grey.

I say, ‘You’re it? This is the team?’

Jones the SOCO, who clearly knows his colleague socially not just professionally, says, ‘Yes, love, this isn’t CSI.’

I’m thrilled to be called ‘love’ by anyone with a porn star moustache, but can’t help pointing out that the woman inside died via a combination of starvation and poisoning. That we believe her to have been the unwitting accomplice of a complex fraud. And that, actually, crime scene investigation is precisely what this is.

The two men roll their eyes at each other over my head. I’m too prettily feminine to be offended. Just say, ‘She’s in the kitchen. You can view her from that window.’

Jones looks through the window. Clocks the sight, the smell. And, when it comes to the point, seems reasonably professional. Suits up properly. Gloves and mask. Steps into the house. Doesn’t go in far, just enough to view the corpse.

I ask him if he has a spare suit in his car. He does. It’s ridiculously large – a man’s size, XL – but I put it on anyway. By the time I’m ready to re-enter the house, the fat DS is sitting on the garden wall about to light up.

I say, ‘If you’re going to have a cigarette, you are not having it there. You haven’t secured the back of the house. You haven’t checked the garage and parking area. Given that any third party would have arrived by car, those areas form part of the crime scene. DI Dunwoody is on his way over here now and he will expect me to report to him when he gets here.’

I tie off my charm-package with a neat little smile and head on into the house. Jones hasn’t moved far. The little front hall commands the living room on the left, the kitchen on the right. He’s checking both rooms with a high power ALS lamp, swapping filters to check for biological traces.

‘No blood that I can see. Plenty of fingerprints, of course. No drugs showing up. Let’s try bright white.’

He removes the filter and swipes the torch around the floors. The cottage isn’t the cleanest, and the living room has an open fire which looks like it provided the only heating for that part of the house. Under the torch’s glare, every footprint shows up precisely in the dust. The scatter of glass crystals gleams like diamonds.

‘That’s you?’ says Jones, pointing at the footprints which lead from the living room window to the kitchen.

‘Yes.’

There are other prints, but small ones, belonging either to a woman or a child. Hayley Morgan, whom we haven’t yet approached, was no bigger than me. Jones assesses the dead woman’s feet from a distance and looks at the pattern of marks on the living room floor.

‘I don’t see anything,’ he says, meaning male footprints.

‘Me neither.’

We both assume any fraudster is a man, though we have no particular reason to think so.

In the corner by the TV, there’s a bundle of papers, down with the firelighters and matches. Most of the paper looks like it’s there to start a fire with, but there are a couple of soft cardboard document wallets.

‘I’d like those, when you can.’

Jones nods and asks me to pass him his camera. He photographs the scene, wide-angle and close up. Photographs the floor. Moves over to the document wallets. Checks them, close up, for biological traces, and nods to indicate that they’re clear, as far as he can see.

He gives them to me.

As all that is happening, I’m looking into the kitchen. The smell is still intense, though there’s air moving through the house now and I’m standing in the hall by an open door. The more light and air there is in this house, the smaller Morgan seems. A minor detail. A styling accessory.

I take the document wallets, but say, ‘What’s that?’

The kitchen has a rough, textured plaster. On the wall above an electric night storage heater, someone has scratched away at the plaster, wearing a hole right through to the old-fashioned breeze blocks beneath. There are grooves left in the soft plaster. Jones focuses his torch beam on the area. It’s hard to be sure, but the grooves look like tooth marks.

Jones doesn’t say anything direct, just, ‘We’ll know when we examine her mouth.’

‘Yes.’

‘Those things.’ He nods at the exposed block wall. ‘They’re made of compacted coal ash. Waste materials from a blast furnace. God knows what kind of chemicals in there.’

‘Yes.’

He shines the lamp on Morgan’s face. Her personality somehow shrinks away under the illumination. Simplifying, reducing. There is dust on her face. The dust might be a combination of plaster and coal ash or it might not. He moves his lamp away and there is something reverential in the way he does it.

I have my documents. He has his camera.

‘I’ll get on then,’ he says.

I don’t know how to answer that either, so I just say ‘Yes.’