The house does not particularly look as though a murder has occurred within it. It's a low-slung, one-story affair tucked in near the edge of Too Many Cows's central housing development, five minutes from the train station.

But even if the house itself looks idyllic, the milling figures in black tunics and purple pants paint a different story. Two of them load a body, wrapped in a white body bag, into a small electric vehicle that has more golf-cart in its ancestry than car. Another sits on the steps, with his arms around a person in a fluffy green robe, who clings to him and cries.

Another resident of the house stands in the kitchen, a red shawl pulled around her shoulders. She makes a complicated dinner with mechanical precision and efficiency, only the white of her knuckles betraying her emotions to the harried community mediator who comes to check on her.

And in a room in the back of the house — tucked into the corner, under the shade of an old oak, a forensic technician does their best to catalog and document the scene.

Jannami's chair — for yes, it is the famous author who was taken away in the body bag ­— has been knocked over, as though pushed back from her desk in a great hurry. Her body fell the other way, along the edge of the desk, leaving her at almost ninety degrees to the chair. The bloodspatter from the gunshot to her head decorates the corner of the room containing her reference bookcase. A scattered collection of papers covers her desk, and one fell to the floor, perhaps at the same time she jumped from her chair.

The angle of the shot seems to suggest that her assailant stood just inside the doorway to the room when they fired, but the belabored forensic technician has found no trace of whoever wielded the gun.

It is into this sad and sorry scene that our protagonist now comes.