27

Sitting in meeting room three at Paddington Green Station, half-drunk cups of cold coffee littering the table in front of them, tape and camera still running after nearly two hours, it occurred to Tartaglia that he’d been bowled yet another googly. It was proving to be a long and frustrating night and the pressure of knowing that Steele and Kennedy were watching in another room on the video link, along with Dave Wightman, didn’t help.

Sean Asher had been arrested on suspicion of murder but was proving impervious to any of the usual tactics. He seemed quite resigned to sitting there all night, if need be. Whatever Tartaglia and Nick Minderedes threw at him, he refused to admit to having killed Kelly Goodhart. He spoke quietly and emphatically and refused to raise his voice. He had even politely told his brief to shut up when she had tried to intervene at one point. Considering everything, Asher seemed extraordinarily calm and in control of himself. It was as if none of it mattered. He was innocent and he didn’t need anybody to look out for him. He had all the self-righteousness of a martyr.

The room was hot and airless and beneath his jacket, Tartaglia could feel his shirt sticking to his skin, the collar uncomfortably tight. He wondered how much longer Asher would hold out. Asher sat calmly opposite, upright in his chair, dressed like a student in torn, faded jeans, trainers and a short-sleeved black T-shirt which showed off a muscular pair of arms. Judging by the smell coming from Asher’s corner, he hadn’t washed in days. He was in his early thirties, tall and well-built, with very short spiky brown hair that looked recently cut. Apart from the length of his hair, he fitted the general description of the man seen with Gemma Kramer. However, there was something soft, almost girlish about his round face, which was at odds with his muscular physique, and the nails of his nicotine-stained fingers were bitten to the quick, indicating a nervous, self-destructive disposition. He was not how Tartaglia had pictured Tom.

Asher’s fingerprint had popped up on the system because he had been arrested for a minor affray during an anti-Iraq war demonstration a few years before. There was nothing else on the system and it was hardly a textbook background for a serial killer. It didn’t feel right. Tom didn’t seem the type to waste time with ideals. Tartaglia couldn’t see him waving the flag for anybody other than himself and if he had, he certainly wouldn’t be so stupid as to get arrested for something so trivial.

Before the interview had started, Steele had shown Tartaglia a copy of the most recent email from Tom. She was matter-of-fact about it, but he sensed beneath that cool exterior that it was getting to her and, thinking back again to the lines in the email, he felt full of doubt. He just couldn’t square the tone and vocabulary of what he had read with the weak-faced man sitting in front of him.

The brief, Harriet Wilson, was a tired-looking woman in her mid-forties, with a mess of sandy hair threaded heavily with grey. She sat silently beside Asher, fanning her face with a notebook, eyes focused on a far corner of the room while Asher went through the answers for the umpteenth time. Yes, he had gone to Hammersmith Bridge with Kelly Goodhart. Yes, they had made a suicide pact to jump off the bridge together. But no, he hadn’t tried to kill her. She had tried to take him with her instead. The witness was either lying or blind. The one thing he wouldn’t volunteer was why he had wanted to kill himself in the first place.

‘You really expect me to believe that she tried to pull you over with her? What a load of crap,’ Minderedes said, throwing his eyes up to the ceiling and shaking his head as if he couldn’t stomach such a lie.

Asher shrugged. ‘Why not? It’s the truth. She was in a right state, I can tell you. Didn’t want to do it on her own.’ His voice was surprisingly high pitched for a tall man, nasal, almost reedy, and he had a light northern accent.

‘But according to you, you let her.’

‘Couldn’t help it. As I said, when I got there, I bottled out. Found I couldn’t go through with it.’

‘You say you changed your mind,’ Tartaglia said, cutting in. ‘You still haven’t told us why.’

Asher raised his thin brows. ‘Why? I got cold feet, like. It’s allowed, isn’t it? Hadn’t signed a ruddy contract.’

Late at night, forty feet up on a freezing, windy bridge, with a total stranger, Tartaglia could almost sympathise. But Tom was a clever bastard and it was the only story that made sense, other than genuine innocence.

Minderedes leaned across the table with his hard man face. He too was sweating heavily, his usually fluffy dark hair plastered back on his skull. With his strange yellow-green eyes and beetley black brows, he actually looked quite menacing.

‘Pull the other one, Tom. It’s got bells on it,’ he said.

‘Why do you keep calling me Tom? My name’s Sean.’

‘Silly me. I’m the one who’s confused again,’ Minderedes said. ‘You told her your name was Chris, didn’t you?’

‘Right. I explained that.’

‘You said you didn’t want her to know who you really were, in case she was some sort of nutter.’

‘That’s right.’

‘But you’re the nutter, aren’t you?’

Asher shook his head. ‘Christ, you people are so cynical. It’s sad.’

‘Goes with the job. If you saw what we see every day… but there, I’m forgetting that you do.’

Asher’s expression hardened. ‘If I want to do away with myself, that’s my business. Nobody else’s. And it don’t make me a nutter.’

‘It does, when you try to involve someone else.’

‘I didn’t “try to involve her”, as you say. She was acting under her own free will. That’s not against the law, is it, or is Big Brother already onto that little loophole? Fuck free will. Just do what you’re told. Is that it?’

‘You think it’s a loophole, persuading people to kill themselves in front of you, pushing them off when they don’t want to do it? In our book, it’s murder.’

Asher shook his head slowly as if he found the question incredible. ‘I didn’t push her and I didn’t have to persuade her. It was what she wanted to do. How many more times do I have to say it?’

Minderedes banged the table with his fist and stood up. ‘As many as it will take until you tell us the truth, matey.’

‘I give up. You folk are worse than on the box.’ Asher folded his arms tightly in front of him, clamping his lips shut as if there was nothing more to be said. He was mistaken if he thought they were going to let it go at that.

‘I’ve had enough of your fucking stories,’ Minderedes said, and turned his back on Asher, striding over to the tiny barred window in the corner and appearing to look out. It was a good dramatic gesture until you knew that there was only the car park outside.

Tartaglia had so far taken a back seat for most of the proceedings and let Minderedes have his head. He was an excellent detective and generally good at interviews, usually because he knew how to get up the interviewee’s nose to the point where they let something slip out of sheer annoyance. But Asher seemed impervious. It was time for a more subtle approach.

‘OK, Sean. Let’s say we believe you for a moment. We’ve read the emails between you and Kelly Goodhart. Why was she so wary of you? What was she scared of?’

‘I told you, she thought I was someone else.’

‘Who?’

‘Search me.’

‘You obviously said something to reassure her when you spoke on the phone, otherwise she would have never agreed to meet you.’

‘Don’t remember.’

‘That’s not good enough, you know. Unless you can convince us otherwise, we’re looking at a charge of murder here.’

The brief sprang to life. ‘Hang on a minute. We’re going round in circles here. You don’t even have a body.’

‘Come on, Mrs Wilson,’ Tartaglia said. ‘Don’t get technical. You don’t think Kelly Goodhart would have survived, do you?’ Wilson stared blankly at him. ‘It’s only a matter of time before her body turns up.’

She sighed. ‘OK, Inspector. Say it does. Even in your wildest dreams, you can’t turn this into a charge of murder.’

‘Can’t we? The witness saw him struggle with Mrs Goodhart. She said she thought he pushed her over.’

‘Inspector, I don’t want to teach my grandmother to suck eggs but you know there’s all the difference in the world between someone thinking something might have happened and it actually happening. All you have is suspicion.’

‘Yes, reasonable suspicion in the circumstances.’

Wilson shook her head. ‘As I see it, we have a set of circumstances here which can be interpreted at least two ways.’

Tartaglia stifled a sigh, wiping his brow with the back of his hand. Wilson was right, of course. Somehow, just by articulating it, she had managed to deflate even the smallest bubble of hope. They had nothing at that juncture that would even get past the CPS, unless of course Asher confessed, and it looked very unlikely that he was going to oblige.

‘My client is trying to be helpful, Inspector,’ Wilson continued. ‘But if you insist on pushing this murder lark without any proper evidence, I’m going to have to advise him to stop talking to you.’

Tartaglia continued to look at Sean, who was staring down at the table in front of him, expression fixed as if he was no longer engaged in the conversation.

‘Help me, Sean, and I’ll help you.’ He waited for a moment, studying Asher’s blank moon of a face, wondering what was going on in his mind. ‘See here, Sean, we’re looking for somebody who was in contact with Kelly Goodhart and wanted to watch her die. Sick though that is, he wouldn’t just leave it there. If she got cold feet, like you say happened to you, he’d damn well make sure she did it, whether she wanted to or not.’ There was still no reaction from Asher. ‘How would you feel if somebody had forced you to go through with it? Not because they wanted company in the last moments of their life, like Mrs Goodhart, but because they’re warped and twisted and get turned on by it. This bloke is sick. He gets his kicks from watching innocent people die.’ Asher looked up, an almost imperceptible softening about the corners of his eyes. ‘If you’re not this man, as you say you’re not, we need to find him.’ Still watching Asher, Tartaglia let the sentence hang before continuing. ‘We know he’s done it before. Not with mature women like Mrs Goodhart, who were sure about what they were doing, but with young, defenceless, depressed little girls.’

‘Don’t start trying to shift the ground, Inspector,’ Mrs Wilson said. ‘We’re here to talk about only one thing and that’s what happened on Hammersmith Bridge.’

‘This is the bloke in the papers, right?’ Asher said, ignoring her, looking puzzled.

‘We think so,’ Tartaglia said. ‘Please try and remember what Kelly Goodhart told you. It’s very important.’

Asher scratched his bottom lip. For a moment it looked as if he was about to come out with something meaningful. Then he shook his head. ‘I don’t remember, I’m sorry.’

Tartaglia sighed. He didn’t believe him for a second. ‘OK. Let’s take a break here. Interview suspended at ten fifty p.m.’

He wanted to give Asher time to reflect. He had seen the hesitation in his eyes, the slight unbending as though he had finally caught his interest. Hopefully, what he had said had struck a chord. On a more practical note, he also needed a pee, some fresh air and some more coffee to keep him going. And if he was lucky, he’d also be able to nip out back for a quick fag before Steele caught him.

‘So, we’ve got nothing so far,’ Steele said, in an almost accusatory voice looking from Tartaglia to Minderedes and back again.

‘Certainly nothing to hold him on,’ Minderedes said, shrugging. ‘Unless we turn up something juicy when we search his flat, that is.’

They were in another meeting room along the corridor from where Asher was being held. Steele, Tartaglia, Wightman and Minderedes were grouped around the small table, coffee and a half-eaten plate of stale sandwiches from the canteen in front of them. Kennedy stood behind, as if he wanted to separate himself from proceedings, leaning against the wall, hands in pockets, his expression unreadable.

The room was just as airless and stiflingly hot, thick with the sour smell of stale sweat and tired bodies, the occasional whiff of aftershave coming from Minderedes whenever he leaned across for his coffee or a sandwich. It was enough to give anyone a headache. Still dying for a smoke, Tartaglia wondered how much longer Steele would keep them there, pointlessly going round and round in circles. He wanted to get back to Asher. He knew he had something interesting to say.

The only surprising thing was how silent Kennedy was. Never one normally to hold back with his opinions, it almost seemed as if he wasn’t there. Either he was deliberately trying not to intrude, which was uncharacteristic, or he was stumped and didn’t want to admit it.

Steele turned to Tartaglia. ‘Mark?’

Tartaglia was fast coming to the conclusion that Asher wasn’t Tom but there was no point in telling them that. Gut feel counted for nothing in that room and he could already hear what Steele would say: ‘Give me facts, not feelings.’ Everything was black and white to her.

‘I agree with Nick,’ Tartaglia said, trying to focus on concrete matters, things that could be explained in a few simple words. ‘We’ve all seen the emails. Kelly Goodhart wanted to kill herself. Asher just happened to be there for the ride, according to him, and we can’t prove otherwise. The witness was quite far away when she saw the struggle. She thought she saw him push Mrs Goodhart over the bridge. But she isn’t a hundred per cent sure. It won’t stand up to cross-examination, if it ever gets that far, which is unlikely. No, whether Asher really is Tom or not, if he sticks to his story he’ll be home and dry.’

‘Dave? Have you got anything to add?’

Wightman shook his head. It had all been said already.

‘What about you, Patrick,’ Steele asked, looking over her shoulder at Kennedy. ‘What do you think?’

Kennedy frowned and pursed his lips, running his fingers through his thick hair for a moment, as if giving the matter deep consideration. ‘Well, it’s tricky,’ he said slowly. ‘Given what I’ve just seen, Asher’s not the type to respond to pressure. I watched him closely. If anything, strong-arm tactics seemed to reinforce his statement of innocence. Now, you could read that two ways: either he’s a tough nut, who’s worked out that if he sticks to the story, you have nothing on him; or he’s probably telling the truth.’ It was stating the obvious but somehow Kennedy made it sound as if he had invented it.

‘Do you think this is our man?’ Steele asked, still looking at Kennedy as if she was hoping for something more.

Again Kennedy paused for thought, then shook his head. ‘Impossible to tell. It’s all academic anyway, if you can’t hold him.’

Steele sighed, locked her fingers and stretched her arms out in front as if her shoulders were stiff. ‘We can’t let him go yet,’ she said. ‘He’s all we’ve got. If he doesn’t want to talk, we’d better search his flat and see if we can turn something up. Can you sort it out, Nick?’

Minderedes was about to reply when there was a knock and Harriet Wilson put her head around the door, catching Tartaglia’s eye.

‘Mr Asher would like to talk to you, Inspector. Off the record.’

‘Off the record, what does he think this is?’ Steele said. ‘A blooming free session of counselling?’

Wilson shrugged. ‘Don’t shoot the messenger. I don’t even know what it is he wants to say. But he’s said he will only speak to the Inspector alone.’

‘Just me?’ Tartaglia asked.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Doesn’t even want me there. I think he’s actually trying to be cooperative,’ she added, seeing Steele shaking her head. ‘If you assume innocence for a change rather than instant guilt, why don’t you give it a whirl?’

‘Why should we?’ Steele said flatly. ‘He’s in here on suspicion of murder. We’re not at his beck and call.’

‘I know it’s nothing to do with me,’ Wilson said. ‘But what have you got to lose? The time’s ticking away and you know that you’ve got nothing to hold him here.’

‘We haven’t searched his flat yet.’

‘If he’s innocent, like he says, you won’t find anything and I doubt whether he’ll want to speak to you any more after that.’ She looked around the room at the watching faces. ‘Look, what harm can it do, just a few minutes of the Inspector’s time. If you don’t learn anything, you can always go back to plan A, that is if you have a plan A.’

After a bit of bartering they had compromised. No tape and no video, but Tartaglia, now sitting opposite Asher, alone in the room, was allowed to make notes. If, in the end, he was wrong and Asher turned out to be Tom, it would be the strangest of games. He had brought Asher a sandwich and a cup of coffee, both of which sat on the table untouched.

‘We spoke on the phone a couple of times,’ Asher said quietly. ‘At first she was very wary, kept trying to catch me out. I began to think that it wasn’t worth the ticket. But gradually she came round a bit.’

‘Why do you think that was?’

Asher paused for a moment, as if he was trying to think back. ‘Well, she said my voice was different, for starters.’

‘In what way different?’

‘Don’t know. Different tone maybe. I got the feeling the other bloke spoke posh, like the people who read the news on the telly. She thought I was putting on my accent at first.’

‘You persuaded her you weren’t?’

‘Not to start with. Asked me where I come from and all sorts of other things like that, family, school, you know. It was like being interviewed for a bloody job. I had to tell her my name’s not Chris. That put her off for a bit. Then she rang me again with some more questions.’

‘Did she tell you anything about herself?’

‘Said she was a lawyer. That didn’t surprise me, the way she kept asking the bleeding questions. Really pissed me off, it did. But when she told me her husband had died in the tsunami, I felt sorry for her. Then she told me about the other bloke and I understood why she had to check me out.’

‘This was all on the phone?’

Asher nodded.

‘For someone who was so wary to start off with, it sounds as if she was easily convinced, don’t you think? How did she know that you weren’t the other man?’

‘Gut feel, I suppose,’ Asher said, almost a little too quickly. ‘You just make your mind up about someone.’

Tartaglia stared hard at him, making Asher look away. ‘There’s more, isn’t there, Mr Asher?’

Asher was silent for a moment before replying. ‘Yeah. It’s what I didn’t want to say before.’ He looked up at Tartaglia. ‘Do you have a fag?’

In spite of the no smoking sign on the wall, Tartaglia offered him one and lit one himself. Asher took the first pull as if it were his last, then leaned back hard against his chair, making it creak. He sighed heavily. ‘I suppose you’d better know. She wouldn’t meet me at all, until I told her why I wanted to top myself.’

Again Asher was silent, as if something was weighing heavily on his mind. His face was slack, mouth half open, eyes vacant as if he were somewhere else.

‘Well?’ Tartaglia said.

Asher looked up. ‘I used to be a PE teacher, until recently, that is. My last job was at a posh girls’ school out in Surrey.’ He paused, filling his lungs with more smoke. ‘I made the stupid mistake of falling for one of the girls. It was nothing smutty,’ he added quickly, catching the look on Tartaglia’s face. ‘Nothing like that, Inspector. I’m not a paedophile. Really I’m not. All we did was a bit of kissing and cuddling, that’s all.’

‘I’ve heard that before.’

‘I can see what you’re thinking but you’re wrong. They were all wrong. Her name’s Sarah and I loved her, you see. I really loved her and wanted to marry her when she was old enough. She was fifteen going on twenty-five. A beautiful young thing with a wise head on young shoulders. She was a lot wiser than me, I can tell you.’

Asher took another deep drag on the cigarette, blowing the smoke into rings, which curled up towards the strip light above. ‘To cut a long story short, her parents found out, went to see the bloody headmistress and I was sacked. It’s not fair, is it?’

‘What, being sacked?’

‘No. I didn’t mind about that so much. What’s unfair is you can’t choose who you love, can you?’

Tartaglia saw the pain in Asher’s eyes and nodded. How right Asher was. The pursuit of love, nothing sensible or reasoned about it, something that, try as you might, was impossible to control: the madness; the highs; the terrible lows. He thought back, remembering all those stupid mistakes and errors of judgement that he’d made, the time and energy wasted, hope burning strong, followed by disillusionment, finding that he’d been chasing after a fantasy. The cold light of day that flooded in afterwards was always so harsh and unforgiving. But he had never been totally desperate and without hope. He had never lost all sense of himself or his trust in the goodness of life and the future. Perhaps he had never let himself go to the brink, never completely put himself on the line. Some people were just more highly tuned than others. Although he wasn’t like Sean Asher, he could still feel for him and pity his pain.

‘You wanted to kill yourself because of her?’ Tartalia asked.

Asher nodded, nibbling hard at a piece of loose skin around one of his nails. His finger was bleeding but he didn’t seem to care. ‘Her parents took her away from school and sent her abroad for the summer. She got over it quickly but I didn’t. Still haven’t,’ he added after a moment.

‘We’ll have to check this out, you know.’

Asher shrugged. ‘Be my guest. I’ve nothing to hide now. I thought she still loved me, you see, that it was only a matter of time before we could be together. Then…’

‘Then?’

Asher sighed. ‘Then she wrote to me. They call it a Dear John letter, don’t they? Except mine was addressed to Dear Sean. It was horrible, like another person talking, someone I didn’t know. Maybe her mother made her write it but she signed it. And it was her writing. It did me in, I can tell you. When Kelly asked to see proof of why I wanted to top myself, to see that I was genuine, like, I sent her the letter. Then she understood.’

‘We didn’t come across anything like that in her flat when we went through her things.’

‘She sent it back to me, didn’t she. I’ve still got it and I can show you, if you want.’

‘Please. Why didn’t you tell us this before?’

‘None of you were listening, were you? Too busy trying to make me confess to something I hadn’t done. I thought you wouldn’t understand about Sarah, thought you’d judge me, call me a fucking paedophile and lock me up. Anyway, it’s private. It’s my business, nobody else’s.’

Asher was probably right about how they might have reacted earlier. Tartaglia couldn’t help respecting his reasons for wanting to keep quiet, relieved that at least he now appeared to be getting to the truth. ‘So, getting back to Kelly Goodhart. You managed to convince her that you were genuine.’

Asher nodded.

‘Do you remember anything else she may have said about the other man who contacted her?’

‘I know she never met him. But she said she thought she could trust him and he proved her wrong.’

‘Those were her exact words?’

‘Maybe I haven’t got it quite right but something along those lines. We’d met up, you see. She said she wanted to see me, face to face, like. It was the last hurdle she put me through. We went to a café just off the North End Road. I showed her my passport, just so she’d know I was who I said I was. She said the other bloke had freaked her out. She said he’d been playing with her, egging her on, messing with her head. She could see I wasn’t into that sort of thing.’

From what Asher had said, it sounded like Tom had tried to get to Kelly Goodhart. ‘Did she tell you how he was doing this?’

‘No.’

‘Is there anything else you can tell me about him?’

‘Sorry, no.’

‘Was there anything else she said?’

‘She told me she’d been born and brought up a Catholic and she asked me if I was religious. When I said I’m not, haven’t been to church since I was a kid, she seemed relieved. Said that religion was a disguise for all sorts of evil things. That people use it to get what they want. It was just after we’d been talking about the other bloke but I don’t know if it had anything to do with him.’

‘You’re sure there’s nothing else?’

Asher took a final drag on his cigarette, which was almost down to the butt, and dropped it into his cup of coffee, where it hissed momentarily. ‘I’ve told you everything, I swear. She was a sharp lady, Inspector. Real brainy and nice. I’m sorry she’s gone, truly I am.’

‘Why didn’t you try and talk her out of it?’

‘Because I understood her. I knew what she were feeling, what she was going through. She wanted to end it and I respected that. I could see that the light had gone out for her and it were how I felt at the time too. She just had a darn sight more courage than me.’

They would still have to search Asher’s flat just to make sure, but Tartaglia was convinced by now that nothing would come of it. At least in the meantime, whatever Steele and Kennedy thought, he knew somehow he had made progress.

Dave Wightman drew up along the road from the address in West Hampstead that Tartaglia had given him, and killed the engine. They had let Sean Asher go just before midnight and Wightman had driven quickly over from Paddington Green so that he was ready and waiting for Steele when she arrived home. If Kennedy was with her, Tartaglia had told him to keep watch and take notes. If not, he could go home. When Tartaglia had explained the situation and told him what Clarke had said to him earlier in the hospital, Wightman was only too happy to be involved and trusted with the task. If that’s what the boss wanted, that’s what he would do, no questions asked. He respected both Clarke and Tartaglia more than anybody and he had no liking for Kennedy. He seemed so full of himself and there was also something rather odd about him, although he couldn’t put his finger on exactly what it was. However, he wasn’t entirely surprised to find that Kennedy was a bloody peeping Tom. In his view, all perverts deserved to be outed. Never mind that Steele would be hopping mad if she found out. She had a real blind spot where Kennedy was concerned and if something peculiar was going on, it needed to be exposed.

Wightman looked at his watch. It was well past midnight. Luckily, he had nobody waiting at home for him, apart from his mum, and she was used to his erratic hours and would have been in bed, asleep, long ago. He listened to Heart FM for about ten minutes, until he saw Steele’s car coming down the road and switched off the radio. He ducked down as she passed and waited for her to get out. She was on her own and he watched her park a little further along the road, walk to the front door and go in.

Tartaglia had left Paddington Green before any of them and in ten minutes he was home. He felt wired, thoughts buzzing in his mind. Even though it would be an early start next morning, there was no point in trying to go to sleep yet. He switched on the music system, not bothering to check what CD was in the machine, opened a bottle of Gavi which had been chilling in the fridge, and poured himself a large glass. It tasted a little sharp but he didn’t care. Unbuttoning his shirt, he walked around the room with his glass of wine, thinking about Sean Asher. Something Asher had said kept niggling at him but try as he might, he couldn’t think what it was. He tried replaying the interview in his mind, word by word, seeing Asher sitting in front of him, picturing his expressions and reactions. But it still wouldn’t come. From experience he knew not to try and winkle it out, no point in trying to force it. It would come when it was ready, if at all.

There was only one message on the answer machine, from Nicoletta, again insisting that he come to lunch. He was positive now that she was hatching a plot and, irritated by her persistence, he deleted the message, went into the bathroom, turned on the shower and got undressed. As soon as the water was hot, he stepped in, turned the tap on full to get maximum pressure and moved the temperature gauge up a little until the heat was almost unbearable. The cubicle filled with steam almost immediately and he took several deep breaths, shutting his eyes, trying to clear his thoughts.

Thinking of the second email that Steele had received that day, he wondered how she was feeling, going back to her flat on her own. He couldn’t believe that the words had left her untouched, that she wouldn’t be worried. But there was no point in offering help where it wasn’t wanted. He grabbed a bottle of shampoo from the rack and massaged a small amount into his scalp. It felt good and he stood rubbing it in, thanking his lucky stars that his thick hair showed no signs of thinning as he got older, unlike his brother-in-law John, Nicoletta’s husband, who had lost most of his hair in the space of five years.

When he had finished, he got out and had just started to dry himself when he heard his mobile ringing in the sitting room. He picked it up just before voicemail kicked in and heard Wightman’s voice at the other end.

‘I did what you said, sir,’ Wightman said. ‘She came home on her own and went inside. I waited, like you asked me to, and about ten minutes later, Kennedy showed. He hung around for a bit in the street and then went round the back, just like you said. Her lights were still on and he was gone a good quarter of an hour. Then he came out again and drove off.’

‘You wrote all of this down?’

‘Yeah, with the exact times. I waited a bit, just to make sure he wouldn’t come back and, when he didn’t, I thought I’d go and take a look round the back. There’s a gate halfway down the side passage but the lock’s broken, so anyone can go through. Her bathroom and kitchen’s down there. She’d left the lights blazing all over the place. The blind was drawn in the bathroom but I could see right into the kitchen.’

‘What about her bedroom?’

‘It’s round the back. She had the curtains drawn but they don’t quite meet and I could see her quite clearly lying in bed. I think she had the telly on because I could hear the noise in the background. He must have stood there, watching her.’

‘Good work. I had a feeling he’d go there again, particularly after seeing her this evening. He just can’t resist.’

‘What are you going to do, sir?’

‘I’d like you to do the same tomorrow night and I think you should take somebody with you. If Kennedy does it again, I want you to call me and we’ll bring him in. No point in messing about any longer.’

‘No, and he bloody deserves what’s coming.’