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Last year someone celebrated Christmas by hanging a tramp with a noose of barbed wire in the doorway of an empty flat where he was squatting. A while before that, a kid took a swan-dive off the eighth-floor walkway head first onto the concrete.’

I pondered this. ‘Is all of this inside the bell-shaped curve, or out of it?’ I asked him.

Nicky’s face lit up as he answered, with the fervour of the data-rat. He’s never happier than when he’s slinging some choice statistics.

‘How many people live in that towering shithole, would you say? With full occupancy, I’d say it would be pushing three thousand.

But some flats are in between tenants and some have been certified unfit for human habitation. Call it two thousand, for the sake of argument.

‘Average percentage for public-disorder offences involving violence is 2.2 per thousand head of population. That’s across the whole of the UK mainland. For London it’s 2.9, and on the worst sink estates you can expect to be up past five.

The magic number for the Salisbury holds steady at six all the way from 2000 up until late last year. Then it jumps to more than three times that. Okay, across small populations you can expect crazy year-on-year variations, but I’d say this is something special - especially given how wild and wacky some of these incidents are. It reminds me of that time last year, you know? When your friend Asmodeus got loose inside a church and made the whole congregation turn rabid.’"

"Nicky dropped his voice for this last part, because the guy with the greasy hair had turned to look in our direction a moment ago, when Nicky’s tone became more animated.

I nodded. I’d made the same connection myself.

‘I tried to get Juliet on the case, too,’ I murmured. ‘She went down there to take a look at it for me. But she’s being real cagey about what she found.’

‘Cagey?’

‘She won’t discuss it at all. She more or less said she knows what it is but she’s out of it. On the sidelines.

’

Nicky thought this through, obviously fascinated. ‘Did she seem scared?’ he asked. ‘Was it, like, this is too big for her? She doesn’t want to get in deeper than she can deal with?’

I shook my head. ‘No, not that. Or at least, it didn’t feel like that. I just don’t know, Nicky. She’s never bailed on me before. Well,’ I amended, ‘for a while on the Myriam Kale case, when she was seeing it as a sisterhood thing, but even there she came around.