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photographs.
    “The pictures?” he asked.
    “Yep.”
    “It looks like their wedding day.”
    “I’d gathered that. Do you think it’s him?”
    “Um, could be.” He looked more closely, adding: “Yeah, I’d say it was.”
    “Good. What about the other?”
    “The girl? Could be their daughter,” he replied. “The hair colour’s similar, and they both look tall and thin.”
    “Or the bride as a schoolgirl,” I suggested.
    The SOCO bent down to peer at the picture. After a few seconds he said: “I don’t think so.”
    “Why not?”
    “Because the timing’s wrong.”
    “You’ve lost me,” I told him.
    “Can’t be sure,” he went on, “but they both look as if they were taken around the same time. About fifteen or twenty years ago, at a guess. Maybe a bit less for that one.” He pointed towards the schoolgirl.
    “How do you work that out,” I asked, bemused.
    “The knickers,” he replied. “Long time ago they’d be cut straight across. Now they wear them cut higher. These are in-between.”
    “I take it you have daughters,” I said.
    “Yep. Two.”
    “Some men would find a picture like that provocative,” I told him.
    “I know,” he replied. “And you can see why, can’t you?”
    I suppose that was as close as we’d ever get to admitting that it was a sexy image. “I don’t find it sexy,” we’d say, “but I can understand how some men might.”
    “Why,” I asked him, “do the knicker manufacturers make them with high-cut legs when they know that they are intended for children who haven’t reached puberty yet?”
    “Because that’s what the kids want. There’s a demand for them.”
    “But why?”
    “So they can be like their mothers.”
    “Oh.”
    All knowledge is useful. Knowledge catches crooks, I tell the troops. But there are vast landscapes, whole prairies and Mongolian plains, which are a foreign territory to me.They’re the bits surrounding families and children and relationships that have stood the test of time. My speciality, my chosen subject, is ones that have gone wrong. Never mind, I consoled myself; loving families don’t usually murder each other.
    We went downstairs into the kitchen. Peter Latham hadn’t moved, but there was a thin coating of the fingerprint boys’ ally powder over all his possessions. “We decided not to do the knife in situ ,” one of them told me.
    “So you want me to pull it out?”
    “Please.”
    “Great.”
    “But don’t let your hands slip up the handle.”
    “Maybe we should use pliers,” I suggested, but they just shrugged their shoulders and pulled faces.
    “Have we got photos of it?” I asked. We had.
    “And measurements?” We had.
    “Right, let’s have a look, then.”
    Sometimes, you just have to bite the bullet. Or knife, in this case. I stood astride the body and bent down towards the sightless face with its expression cut off at the height of its surprise, a snapshot of the moment of death. Early detectives believed that the eyes of the deceased would capture an image of the murderer, and all you had to do was find a way to develop it.
    I felt for some blade, between the handle and the dead man’s chest, and gripped it tightly with my thumb and forefinger . It didn’t want to come, but I resisted the temptation to move it about and as I increased the pressure it moved, reluctantly at first, then half-heartedly, like the cork from a bottle of Frascati, until it slipped clear of the body. The SOCO held a plastic bag towards me and I placed the knife in it as if it were a holy relic.
    “Phew!” I said, glad it was over. I could feel sweat on my spine.
    “Well done,” someone murmured.
    My happy band of crime-fighters started to arrive, wearing the clothes they’d intended spending the rest of the evening in. Annette Brown was in jeans and a Harlequins rugby shirt, and my mouth filled with ashes when I saw her. She’s been with us for about a year, and was now a valuable member of the team. For a long