‘Well answer it.’

‘What do I say?’

‘Try “Hello”. Then tell whoever it is I’ll call them back in five minutes.’

Naked, he steps heavily into the shower. Every movement he makes seems to be heavy these days. Nimbleness is a thing of the past. He has not been lithe for about twenty years. OK, maybe it was a couple more than three or four glasses of Grouse. And he’ll have to check the crushed butts in the tin lid to confirm the number of mini-cigars he puffed his way through during the course of the evening, although judging by the tightness in his chest and his stinking fingers and hair, he’d guess it was all of them. The scalding water drums against his head. Café Crème cigars, he thinks. The last refuge of a scoundrel trying to quit cigarettes.

Downstairs, Alex is teasing his hair in the hall mirror and staring ruefully at a swatch of acne that has materialized on his cheeks. He is, thinks Vos, the very picture of a gawky teenager. How the hell has he got so tall? When the hell did he get to be sixteen?

‘I’m off,’ Alex says, swinging his haversack over one skinny shoulder and heading for the door.

‘Who was it?’

‘Uh?’

‘On the phone.’

‘Someone from work, I think. Can you call them back.’

‘Did they give a name?’

‘Dunno. It was a woman, though.’

‘Superintendent Anderson?’

‘Nah.’

‘Bernice Seagram?’

‘Yeah. That was it. Look, I got to go.’

‘Done your homework?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Got an apple for teacher?’

‘Er, no.’

‘I don’t know what’s happened to this country,’ Vos says. ‘No respect.’

Alex shakes his head sorrowfully. ‘Tragic, old man,’ he says. ‘Truly tragic.’

Vos watches him go and winces as the front door slams behind him. The hell of adolescence. At least the next logical step is rebellion. This, Vos thinks, will be easier to deal with. Right now Alex is a cerebral kid with a sweet nature, but sometimes his almost supernatural placidity gives Vos the creeps. When Vos was sixteen years old he’d already laid his feckless wife-beater of a father on his back and warned him that if he ever came back, he’d kill him. And while he would never in a million years want Alex to end up like him, Vos thinks it would be nice to see just a molecule of his own DNA making a fleeting bid for recognition. Alex’s mother walked out six years ago, but in many ways Vos sees her every day of his life.

He picks up his mobile from the kitchen counter and punches in the number of Acting DS Seagram, who answers on the second ring.

‘You ever hear of a Newcastle United player called Enrico Cabaljo, boss?’ Seagram says.

‘The No-Goal Wonder from Venezuela? What about him?’

‘I’m standing in his back garden.’

THREE

Enrico Cabaljo cost £10 million from Caracas FC and failed to find the net in twenty-five starts. He is currently on loan to a team in Italy while a way is found to terminate his £120,000-a-week contract. Meanwhile his £2 million house stands empty, the security gates locked except on Monday mornings, when the gardener turns up to cut the grass, tend the flowerbeds and check there are no dead koi carp floating belly-up in the pond.

It was the gardener who found the body.

The house is situated on the outskirts of Stannington, a village fifteen miles north of Newcastle populated mainly by lawyers, stockbrokers and other wealthy commuters. Today they have been obliged to find an alternative way to work, because the narrow road through their adopted village has been blocked off at either end by a clot of police patrol cars, emergency vehicles and cordon tape.

Vos abandons his car outside the village hall, walks towards the flashing lights, ducks under the flapping tape and picks his way through the uniforms and white-suited Crime Scene Investigators to the gates of Enrico Cabaljo’s house. Here he pauses to slip on a pair of polythene overshoes and a paper suit and continues up the long gravel path and round the side of the house to the garden, where DC Mayson Calvert is emerging from a white protective tent that has been erected on the lawn like the marquee for a summer drinks party. Calvert has horn-rimmed glasses perched on a beaky nose, and his suit hangs from his thin frame like a sloughed skin.

‘Extraordinary,’ he says, blinking as if he has just witnessed a particularly awe-inspiring chemical reaction, so lost in thought he does not recognize Vos at first. ‘Morning, boss,’ he says.

‘Where’s Bernice?’

‘She’s ah—’

Seagram’s voice comes through the doorway of the tent. ‘In here, boss.’

At thirty-six, Bernice Seagram is the most experienced of the junior detectives on the squad and the obvious choice to step into Entwistle’s shoes. Indeed there are some who wonder why she hasn’t already been promoted, if maybe she lacks the ambition required to move up the ranks in CID. But they don’t appreciate that if that happened, Seagram would have to leave the squad – and while ambition is one thing, loyalty is another. The only reason Seagram would ever leave Vos’s squad is if Vos told her to.

She is a squat woman with short, spiky hair who favours dark eyeliner and just a hint of lipstick. She is also an inveterate smoker, and you can always find her at the end of a trail of menthol butts smudged with plum-coloured Revlon. Right now she is standing with a knot of CSIs, staring down at the body of a man lying on the grass.

Or at least what remains of the body.

The man is mid-thirties, with a Middle Eastern appearance, wearing a white shirt and grey chinos. He is lying on his back with his right arm and leg splayed out; his other arm is jammed in tight against the left side of his ribcage and sternum, which in turn have been crushed almost flat, like a collapsed concertina. His left leg is missing, torn away at the hip.

‘He’s not a Venezuelan footballer, is he?’ Vos says, peering at the dead man’s face, which, considering the catastrophic damage to the rest of his body, seems remarkably intact. Peaceful, almost.

‘We don’t know who he is, boss,’ says Seagram. ‘The gardener found him shortly after seven this morning when he opened up.’

‘No ID?’

‘No.’

‘And what about that?’ Vos says. About six feet away from the body, two of the CSIs are hunkered down with a tape measure, calculating the dimensions of a lozenge-shaped divot in the lawn.

Seagram shrugs. ‘Difficult to be certain, boss – but it looks like that’s where he landed.’

One of the CSIs stands up from the hole and comes across. His name is Gordon Watson and he is the head of the Crime Scene Investigation team. He nods a rueful greeting to Vos, then pushes back his elasticated hood and runs a hand through his brush-like silver hair.

‘Hell of a way to start the week, Theo,’ he says briskly.

‘When is it not, Gordon?’ Vos says. ‘So what do you think?’

‘We’ll have to do the sums, but judging by the depth of the impact crater I’d say our friend wasn’t wearing a parachute.’

Vos looks at Watson and then Seagram and then back again. ‘You’re telling me he just fell out of the sky?’

Watson shrugs. ‘I don’t know what I’m telling you. All I know is what I can see – and that’s a bloody great impact crater and a body with injuries that would appear consistent with a fall from a great height.’

Vos looks from the crater to the body. He frowns. ‘Have you moved him, Gordon?’

‘That’s how far he bounced,’ Watson says. ‘Two solid weeks of rain, the ground’s like a sponge.’

‘Where’s his other leg?’

‘Still looking.’

There’s a sudden rumble and a shimmering pulse of metallic noise, and two hundred yards away, beyond the trees at the end of the garden, a high-speed train explodes into view. Everyone in the garden stops to watch the carriages racing past and then, just when it seems it will go on forever, the train has gone.