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It comes to something when you have to give a colleague eating lessons.’
    ‘Well, I haven’t got your brain,’ McLaren said sulkily.
    ‘Whoever’s got yours ought to give it back.’
    ‘Ah, you’re always givin’ out to the poor oul culchie,’ Connolly stepped in. ‘Would you not give him a break once?’ McLaren stared at her with his mouth open. No-one had ever stood up for him before. She looked at him kindly. ‘Shut your mouth, Maurice, for feck’s sake. I can see the last three meals you’ve eaten.’
    Mackay looked up from the racing pages of the Sun . ‘Anyone got anything for Lingfield tomorrow?’
    McLaren saw the chance to take the attention off his eating habits. ‘Two thirty. Horse called Make Or Break. Dead cert.’
    ‘Like the last dead cert you gave me?’ Atherton asked. He liked a flutter on the ponies now and then. ‘Remember Bredon Hill?’
    ‘Bredon Hill’s a good horse,’ McLaren said stubbornly.
    ‘I’m sure he’s very handsome. What I complain about is his serene, almost Buddhist approach to racing.’
    ‘You wanted an outsider,’ McLaren pointed out. ‘No point betting at five to four on, that’s what you said.’
    ‘It’s your own fault for asking him,’ Swilley said. ‘I’ve no patience with anyone who gambles. It’s a mug’s game.’
    ‘You wouldn’t understand,’ said Atherton. ‘A man has to have his pleasures.’
    ‘Yeah, right,’ McLaren agreed glutinously, through the chocolate, caramel and fondant melting round his tonsils.
    Slider came in. ‘All right, settle down everybody.’ He spotted Atherton’s cup. ‘Anybody get me one?’
    Swilley gave Atherton a pointed look that failed by several furlongs to make him blush, and said, ‘I’ll go, boss.’
    ‘No, never mind now. I’ll have one later. All right, Lionel Bygod, age sixty-six, lived alone, apparently divorced, done to death by blows to the back of his head, several, while sitting at his desk. Some time yesterday afternoon or evening. Found by his housekeeper this morning. There seems not to be any other disturbance, no sign of break-in. He was wearing a very nice watch, and his wallet was still in his pocket with seventy pounds cash in it.’
    ‘So apparently not a burglary or robbery from the person,’ said Hollis, his other sergeant, who generally acted as office manager. His thin hair and scrawny moustache always had an unconvincing look, like the feathers of a chick just out of the egg, but he seemed more than usually dishevelled today, and his rather bulging eyes were reddened, as if he hadn’t been having much sleep lately.
    ‘So how’d they get in?’ asked Fathom, newish, callow, a big sweaty lad given to hair gel and powerful aftershave. ‘Those doors with the entryphone, you can’t slip the lock on ’em.’
    ‘Either they were let in, or they had a key,’ Swilley said impatiently. ‘Keep up!’
    ‘According to forensic,’ Slider said, ‘we can be certain from the blood pattern and lack of other traces that he wasn’t moved from somewhere else. That means he was killed where he sat.’
    ‘So someone crept up behind him,’ McLaren said.
    ‘That’s a lot of creeping up,’ said Norma. ‘All the way up those stairs, on lino.’
    ‘And there’s a floorboard on the landing that creaks,’ Atherton said.
    ‘He’d hear them coming. Unless he was deaf.’
    ‘There’s no suggestion he was deaf,’ Slider said. ‘You ignore small sounds from behind you made by someone you know is there, whereas if you think you’re in an empty house you’re likely to turn round to investigate. So I think it’s much more likely the murderer was someone Bygod had let in himself.’
    There was a little murmur around the room about that. Most of them knew about Bygod’s habit of giving advice and help to people who came in off the street; the others were soon enlightened by their neighbours.
    ‘There’s another thing to take into account. The murder weapon – the bronze statuette