The cordon that ran across the front of the house at Railway Terrace was surrounded by rubberneckers, and when Alex and Chloe arrived, uniformed officers were in the process of trying to disperse the crowd. One held up the police tape so that the two detectives could duck beneath it. In the living room, an officer was sitting with Jamie Bateman. The young man’s face looked deathly pale, tear-stained, and he had never appeared more childlike. He looked at but seemed to barely see the two women as they entered the room.

‘What happened, Jamie?’

Alex sat beside him on the sofa, nodding to the officer that she was free to leave to help the others outside. When the boy spoke, his words were barely coherent. ‘He’s still … he’s in there … there’s …’

‘Jamie, take a deep breath and start at the beginning. Tom’s in the kitchen, is that right?’

The young man nodded, fighting back tears. He was evidently still in shock. Alex and Chloe had yet to see the body, but the phone call Alex had received had made it clear how unpleasant the scene was.

‘You found him?’ Alex asked. ‘When was that?’

‘This mor—’ Jamie stopped, unable to speak. He inhaled sharply, in short bursts, as he tried to catch his breath. ‘This morning.’

‘You didn’t sleep here last night?’

Jamie shook his head. ‘I wanted to get away. Everything with Keira, and then Leah … I didn’t want to be here.’

Alex shot Chloe a glance. What the hell had gone on in this house? Two housemates were dead, a third was now missing. The boy sitting beside her looked pathetic, vulnerable, but Alex knew she couldn’t allow herself to be fooled by appearances.

‘Where did you stay?’ Chloe asked.

‘With someone from work. He knows what’s been going on – he said I could have his sofa for the night if I needed a break.’ He put his head in his hands and leaned forward, hiding his face from the two women. ‘Oh God, there was so much blood,’ he said, his voice breaking on the words.

Alex gave Chloe a nod and the two women went out into the hallway. ‘Stay with him for five, give him a chance to calm down a bit,’ Alex said. ‘I’ll go and see the pathologist.’

She headed down to the dining room and stopped at the doorway, where a SOCO was dusting for prints. The man lowered the mask he was wearing and passed her a set of protective shoe covers.

‘Pathologist here yet?’ she asked as she pulled them on.

The man nodded. ‘In the kitchen.’

Alex passed through the dining room, bracing herself for the scene that would greet her. In her seventeen years with the police she had seen some truly horrific things, yet she had always prepared herself with the thought that there was something worse she could encounter. Whatever nightmarish visions she could conjure in her mind, someone somewhere was macabre enough to make those imaginings a reality.

Tom Stoddard was slumped against the glass panel of the back door. His skin looked faded to a pale grey, almost blending with the T-shirt he was wearing. The front of the T-shirt was stained in blood that had spilled from his chest to the floor. No matter the amount of blood, the thing Alex already knew would remain with her was the young man’s eyes, alert yet visionless, still staring at the last sight he was likely to have seen: his killer.

‘There are at least three stab wounds, but I’ll be able to tell more once he’s in the lab.’

Alex’s attention was drawn from Tom’s body as Helen Collier, a pathologist from the University of Wales Hospital, appeared like a ghost at her side, clad from head to foot in white protective clothing. Alex had been oblivious to all three people in the room: Helen, and the two SOCOs who were busy retrieving potential evidence.

‘Where’s the third?’ she asked. The two stab wounds to Tom’s chest were evident from the patterns of blood that stained his T-shirt. The knife was still embedded in his chest, but a second wound was obvious from the stream of blood that had coursed down the left-hand side of his body on to the kitchen’s laminate flooring.

‘Look.’ Helen Collier crouched beside the body and gestured to where the boy sat against the end of the kitchen unit. ‘This pool of blood here – it’s come from his back.’

‘How long do you think he’s been dead?’

‘Initial estimate, between twelve and eighteen hours. Like I said, I’ll be able to tell more once we get him to the lab.’

Alex left the kitchen and went back to the living room. Chloe was standing at the doorway, trying not to focus for too long on Jamie, who was still sitting on the sofa, his head hidden in his hands.

‘You’ll need to come to the station to make a statement, Jamie. Are you OK to do that?’

The boy looked up and nodded. ‘And then what? I can’t come back here.’

‘Where do your parents live?’

‘Carmarthen. I’m not going there, not so they can say they told me so. They never wanted me to move away in the first place.’

‘What about the friend you stayed with last night?’ Chloe asked. ‘Could you go there for a while longer?’

Jamie shrugged. ‘What the hell’s going on here?’ he asked, the words filled with fear. ‘I feel like I’m living in some sort of nightmare.’

‘Have you heard from Leah?’ Alex asked.

‘Leah? No. I thought she was at the hospital. Has she woken up?’

‘Come on,’ Alex said, gesturing him through to the hallway and ignoring his questions. ‘We’ll take you to the station.’