This article, co-authored by an academic and a forensic practitioner, describes some of the gaps in current knowledge of the utility of forensic science support to homicide investigations. It also reflects on the experience of a recent pilot study of the use of forensic science in homicide investigations in an English police force to argue for new kinds of research capable of grasping the ways in which issues of temporality, agency and contingency are imbricated with one another in the typical trajectories of homicide inquiries, at least as far as the contribution of forensic science is concerned.