I’m driving down the M25, doing around 75 mph and listening to Kasabian. They’re a hybrid mix of Oasis and Muse in my opinion: all driving guitar riffs and catchy choruses with a lot of swagger, even though they’re from Leicester, which isn’t a particularly rock-and-roll place all told. I imagine they’re right jumped-up little dickheads, you can just tell, but they’ve got a few tunes so fair play. I’m contemplating messaging back ‘Keen Shirl’ – as I’ve decided to call her – and agreeing to a second date, but I’ve come to the conclusion that it wouldn’t be fair, because I just don’t think I fancy her. I reckon she’d have sex with me though, Keen Shirl. In fact, I’m sure she would, and I don’t mean that in an arrogant way. I just know, you know, but really I’m not that kind of bloke. I’ve never been one of them fuck ‘em and forget ‘em types, just out for the score. And I’m too old for one-night stands now.

Rach had never had a one-night stand in her life, so she told me, and I believed her. ‘They all just kept coming back for more,’ she laughed, throwing her head back like she did whenever she laughed. She had an infectious laugh, you had to join in. Often the laugh itself became the joke. God help me, I miss that girl.

My mind wanders back to Janet Baxter, even above the din from the stereo. I’d rather it didn’t, and I turn Kasabian up a few notches, but it doesn’t drown out my thoughts, so I go with them.

‘My Nigel would never kill himself.’ I see her shaking her head vehemently, grief and conviction in her watery, red-rimmed eyes. She says this is as an absolute unwavering fact. Cynicism in this job is par for the course. You could sum it up with, ‘you think you know someone…’ Being a copper has taught me that, hey, you might think you know someone, but one day you wake up and find you’re married to a serial killer. That shit really happens. What I find interesting in those situations is the doubt that’s often directed towards the wives. ‘She must’ve known, surely? She must’ve suspected her husband was a rapist/paedophile/cross-dresser/whatever, they’ve been married for twenty-five years!’ It’s pretty unfair, because I think in some cases the wife genuinely doesn’t know the person she’s married to. You’ve got to remember who you might be dealing with; psychopaths are absolute masters of disguise, able to shape-shift and operate on a level that would make a chameleon look like an amateur. They are incredibly skilful at pulling the wool over people’s eyes; their ability to manipulate and con makes them utterly convincing, consummate liars of the highest degree, devious beyond the realms of human comprehension and devoid of a conscience and empathy. The absence of empathy: that’s the crux of their disorder, the heart of the matter. Empathy prevents most of us from murdering, pillaging and raping each other. Conscience and the ability to empathise with fellow humans stops us from butchering a child, cutting its body into pieces and inviting its mother round for tea and biscuits. But it does happen. I’ve seen it.

The teddy bear, among other things, is troubling me. Martin Delaney, my number two on the case, did some research and tells me it’s one of those Steiff Bears, quite expensive apparently, collectable. It still had the label attached to its little bear ear when we picked it up. There’s no indication that Nigel Baxter bought it himself, no receipt in his paperwork or in his wallet. I told Delaney to check out the shops where they sell them and it turns out the little bastards are everywhere, mainly in shopping centres and department stores. Apparently you can even build your own, and kids have in-store parties where they get to stuff their own bear and choose its clothes before putting it in a box with a birth certificate and taking it home. They go mad for it apparently, and I wonder if our kid, mine and Rach’s, would’ve loved these bears too. I guess we’d have found out about this kind of thing if he or she had been given the chance to live. Anyway, I tell Delaney to start digging, ask if anyone recalls this particular bear being made. He’s wearing a suit. He’s a business bear. Alan Sugar, but furry.

The other thing that’s bothering me, aside from Kasabian who have started to grate a little now, is the perfume. The housekeeper at La Reymond gave me a list of the complimentary toiletries allocated to each room. The penthouse list reads like a Space NK till receipt. High-end stuff. Rachel was into her smellies, well, what woman isn’t? I liked buying her perfume and candles – she loved a scented candle. Jesus, maybe we were a pair of clichés after all? So, the list. The L’Occitane stuff was still there: tick. The Tigi hair shampoo and conditioner: unused, tick. The Cowshed body butter: all good, tick. Shower cap, pumice stone and one of those squeegee body puffs that you wash yourself with: all in place. Tick, tick, tick. The Jo Malone Lime Basil & Mandarin bath oil: gone. So where was it? Wasn’t in with the rubbish. There was no rubbish save for the champagne cork and wrapper. So the Jo Malone stuff is missing. Vanished. But it was used. It was in the bath water, the bloody bath water. I could smell it. And something tells me that Nigel Baxter didn’t put it there. You’ve got to ask why a man like Nigel Baxter would add a few slugs of sweet smelling oil to his bathwater just for luck? I’m not saying it’s not possible. I mean, who knows what’s going through the mind of a man about to take his own life with a razor blade? But I’m pretty sure it doesn’t have much to do with smelling good. Janet Baxter told me her husband never used ‘cologne’ – an old-fashioned word for an old-fashioned kind of lady.

‘I don’t remember him using cologne, or ever smelling it on him,’ she’d said, sadly, as if she’d long since given up on trying to spice things up between them. So the bear and the bath oil are bugging me. And the towel that was wedged behind his back. Come to think of it, so is the ‘suicide’ note – not much in the way of explanation from a man seemingly of former sound mind and character. In my experience, which is sadly greater than most people’s, suicide is a symptom of deep depression. Victims usually have a history of self-harm or addiction; it could be a second or even third attempt; and there’s nearly always an event that triggers it – a job loss, financial problems, an affair discovered, a loved one lost, drug or alcohol abuse and all that ugliness. It’s pretty rare that a man with Nigel Baxter’s background just wakes up one day and says, ‘enough’s enough’ and opens his veins up in the bath.

Cyber have got his PC and his phone and I’m waiting to see what that throws up. I’m not a betting man – though I did once win a hundred quid on the Grand National – but if I was, I’d put a tidy lump on them coming back with some revelations. A double life perhaps? A mistress at the least. I’d stake our flat on it. ‘Our’. I keep thinking that like she’s still here. I suppose she is really, living on in my thoughts. When do you let go? Do you ever?

Whenever there was an unsolved case, usually involving a man – a case that I couldn’t quite get my head around or that was causing me consternation – Rach would always say, ‘there’s a woman involved.’ Don’t get this wrong, Rachel was essentially a feminist; she loved her own sex, appreciated what it was to be, feel, love and exist as a woman. But she was a realist as well. Rach was nobody’s fool. She knew what was what and how people felt and operated. She understood humanity and life, and people’s idiosyncrasies – in fact, they fascinated her. I remember this one case I worked on: some bloke, a window cleaner, fell from his ladder to his death. It happened in some little suburban town just outside of London, a pretty unremarkable place. Anyway, when we turned up it looked like an accident, you know, a hazard of a window cleaner’s job, ladders and all of that. There was no reason to suspect any foul play. But then a nosy neighbour made a comment about him cleaning that particular house’s windows once a week. And when I told her, Rach said, ‘He’s shagging the wife, it’s pretty obvious…’ She turned out to be right. Said wife’s husband took umbrage to this, as one might, and decided to give him a friendly shove. Sadly, to his death, but you take your chances. Anyway, what I’m saying is that Rach wasn’t one of those women who thinks men are to blame for the world. I loved her for that. Among other things.

I’m thinking about Nigel Baxter, poor old tormented Nigel Baxter, and that bear and the perfumed bath water and all I can hear in my head is Rach’s voice, soft but raspy saying, ‘mark my words, Danny, there’s a woman involved.’