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John Dudley drew an envelope out of his jacket pocket and offered it to Khan. ‘Terms and conditions,’ he explained. ‘I take it you got clearance from Special Grant Funding?’

‘I spoke to them yesterday.’ Khan took the envelope and folded it away without looking at it. ‘Someone will get back to you,’ he said.

They went in. As they entered the hallway, Dudley took out his iPhone, found the Voice Memos app in the Utilities folder and turned it on. At the end of the day he would save the file, transfer it to his laptop and share it with Hawthorne. He also took several photographs, focusing on the extensive bloodstain on the once beige carpet and the splatter on the walls.

‘What was Giles Kenworthy wearing when he answered the door?’ Hawthorne asked.

‘He hadn’t got ready for bed, if that’s what you mean. He had a white shirt, suit trousers. The jacket and tie were in his office.’ Khan pointed towards an open door. ‘He had his slippers on. Prada – mauve cashmere. And he’d drunk a couple of glasses of Hakushu single malt whisky. Expensive stuff and not small measures.’

‘So he was working late. The doorbell rang. He answered and the weapon was fired over the threshold.’

‘It looks that way.’

‘Where did you find it?’

‘It was just dropped on the ground, outside. Mrs Kenworthy didn’t notice it in the darkness. The crossbow belongs to Roderick Browne, who lives next door in the house at the end of the terrace . . . Woodlands, it’s called. No fingerprints – apart from his. It’s always possible that the killer wore gloves.’

‘They just left it?’ Dudley was surprised. ‘You’d have thought they’d have got rid of it. Chucked it in the Thames.’

‘Funnily enough, it was pointing at Roderick Browne’s home. It was almost as if the killer wanted us to know who it belonged to.’

Khan opened the file he had been carrying and took out several photographs, which he handed to Hawthorne. They had been taken from different angles and showed Giles Kenworthy’s body as it had been found. Half of them were in black and white. The ones in colour were more horrible. Hawthorne stopped on a close-up shot of the dead man’s head. He said nothing and his face gave nothing away, but somehow Khan was aware of an extraordinary intensity, a sense that at that moment nothing else in the world mattered.

‘It’s a standard bolt,’ Khan explained. ‘Twenty inches long, aluminium shaft, plastic vanes. We found five more, identical, in the Brownes’ garage.’

‘Has Browne confessed to the killing?’ Dudley asked.

The question took Khan by surprise. ‘No. Why do you ask?’

‘If he’d used his own weapon and his own bolt and he just left it all there for you to find, you’d think maybe he didn’t care if he was caught.’

‘Well, he’s a nervous wreck,’ Khan said. ‘But he hasn’t confessed to anything. Quite the contrary. The first time I met him, all he would say was how shocked he was, how upset, how it couldn’t have had anything to do with him because he was asleep, in bed, with his wife in the next room . . . I wasn’t even accusing him!’

Hawthorne handed the photographs back. ‘You said we could talk to Mr Kenworthy’s widow.’

‘She’s upstairs.’

The Kenworthys’ home was expensive and wanted you to know it. The furniture was Scandinavian, the lights ultra-modern, the carpets ankle-deep and the paintings straight out of some smart auction-house catalogue. Two young boys lived here with their parents, but there was no mess, no scattered clothes or toys, as if their very existence had been wiped away. A plate-glass window at the back, rising almost the full height of the stairs, looked out over the new patio with a Union Jack fluttering on the other side of a chrome-plated beast of a gas barbecue.

Lynda Kenworthy was lying on a bed so large that her entire family could have joined her with room to spare. She seemed to be sinking into the duvet and pillows, her blonde hair hanging loose, her silk dressing gown rising and falling over the folds of her body, her face, with its once perfect make-up, streaked by tears. The room smelled of cigarette smoke. There was an ashtray next to her filled with cigarette butts, each one signed off with a smear of bright red lipstick. None of the windows was open and even if they had been they’d have been helpless behind the great swathes of silk curtains, pelmets, gold cords and tassels.

‘How are you feeling, love?’ Hawthorne asked. From the way he spoke, she could have been recovering from a bad cold.

‘Who are you?’ Lynda asked – her voice little more than a whisper.

‘We’re helping the police,’ Dudley said. ‘We want to find out who killed your husband.’

‘They all hated him!’ Fresh tears followed in the tracks of the old ones. ‘I told him it was a mistake, the moment we came here. They were stuck-up and snobby, the whole lot of them.’

‘So you didn’t get on with the neighbours,’ Dudley remarked.