‘WPC Darby tells me that you found the body of Mrs Frances Shaw.’

‘That’s right,’ I said.

‘And you called it in?’

‘Yes.’

‘Anonymously.’

‘Yes.’

‘Any particular reason for that?’

‘Kind of,’ I said.

He held up his hand to stop me. ‘It’s not our patch,’ he said. ‘I need to phone the Stockwell lads. You’ll have to wait here for a bit, if that’s all right.’

He was just being polite. I don’t think I had a choice. WPC Darby brought me a newspaper and another cup of tea, and I flicked through the pages without taking anything in. It was almost an hour before two more detectives, a man and a woman, came in and sat opposite me. WPC Darby left but DI Carter stood to one side, leaning against the wall. The man introduced himself as Detective Chief Inspector Stuart Ramsay and his colleague as Detective Inspector Bosworth. She opened her bag and took out a bulky machine, which she placed on the table between us. She loaded it with two cassette tapes and switched it on. She said the date and time and identified everybody present, then sat back.

‘The reason we’re being so formal,’ said Ramsay, ‘is that you have already made admissions that lay you open to being charged with a criminal offence. And that’s just to be getting on with. So, it’s important that, before you say anything else, we make clear that you’re entitled to legal representation. If you don’t have a lawyer, we can obtain one for you.’

‘I’m not bothered,’ I said.

‘Does that mean you don’t want a lawyer?’

‘I don’t care,’ I said. ‘No.’

‘And you need to understand that anything you say in this and later interviews can be used as evidence and introduced in court.’

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘So how can I help you?’

The two looked at each other as if they didn’t know quite what to make of me.

‘For a start,’ said Ramsay, ‘you can tell us what the hell you were playing at, leaving a crime scene, interfering with a police inquiry?’

‘It’s a complicated story,’ I said.

‘Then you’d better start telling it,’ said Ramsay.

I had promised myself I would leave nothing out, make no attempt to justify myself or explain things away. I’m not used to telling stories and I started from the murder and worked backwards, and in other directions as well, when necessary, or when I remembered something that seemed relevant. When I first said I’d been working for Frances under an assumed name DI Bosworth’s jaw dropped, like that of a character expressing surprise in a silent movie.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Ramsay. ‘I didn’t quite get that. What did you say?’

‘It’s probably easiest if I tell you everything and then you ask questions about what you don’t understand.’

Ramsay started to say something, then stopped and gestured to me to go on. As I meandered through the story, I felt as if I was talking about the misadventures of someone I didn’t really know – a distant cousin or a friend of a friend – whom I didn’t much care for and certainly didn’t understand. When I got on to the subject of Milena dying in the car accident with Greg and how I’d read her emails and how she had also had an affair with Frances’s husband, David, Ramsay’s head sank slowly into his hands. I then told him that Frances had confided in me that she, too, had had an affair.

‘I thought, or wondered, if the man she had had her affair with was Greg,’ I added.

‘What?’ He raised his head and stared at me; there was a glazed expression in his eyes.

‘You see, she said this man, I never got to know his name, had also had a fling with Milena, then turned to her. It doesn’t sound like the Greg I knew, but by that stage I was so confused I didn’t know what to think about anything.’

‘I know the feeling,’ he growled.

The one detail I deliberately withheld was my sexual relationship, such as it was, with Johnny. I don’t think it was out of any concern that it would make me look bad. It was far too late for that. I just felt it wasn’t an important detail and that at least I could spare Johnny the attention it might bring him.

Anyway, there was hardly a shortage of damaging revelations. When I talked about my attempts to find out about the relationship between Milena and Greg, DI Carter interrupted me. ‘She compiled charts,’ he said.

‘What?’ asked Ramsay, in a weak tone.

‘Like they do with school timetables on big pieces of cardboard. It established the whereabouts of her late husband and of the woman.’

‘Charts,’ said Ramsay, looking at me.

‘I had to know,’ I said. ‘I needed to prove to myself, and to the world maybe, that they really did know each other, or that they really didn’t.’

‘You’ve been told it’s hard to prove a negative,’ said Ramsay. ‘Kind of a police motto.’

‘People keep telling me,’ I said. ‘Not that it’s a police motto, that it’s hard.’

There was a pause. I leaned over the tape-machine to see if the little spools were turning.

‘Is that all?’ asked Ramsay.

‘I think so,’ I said. ‘I’m not sure if I told it in the right order. I may have left things out.’

‘It’s difficult to know where to start,’ said Ramsay. ‘For example, as someone who was working for Frances Shaw under an assumed name, you are an obvious suspect in her murder. If you had stayed on the scene, forensic examination might have exonerated you.’

‘It might not have,’ I said. ‘I pulled her out from where she was lying to see if she was still alive. I examined her. I wasn’t sure if there was something I ought to do to help.’

‘So you moved the body!’ said Ramsay. ‘And then you didn’t tell anybody. Our investigation to date has been based on a complete misunderstanding of the crime scene.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘That’s why I decided I had to get in touch with you.’

‘How kind,’ he said. ‘I still don’t understand. Why did you leave the scene?’

‘I was scared and confused. I thought the person who killed her might still be there. And maybe a part of me was wondering whether I was responsible for her death.’

‘How?’ asked Ramsay.

‘Perhaps I’d been stirring things up. I’m the one person who didn’t believe that Milena and Greg’s death was an accident.’

‘What on earth has that got to do with it?’ said Ramsay.

‘It’s obvious, isn’t it?’

‘Maybe we’re not clever enough to understand,’ said Ramsay. ‘Could you explain why it’s so obvious?’

‘My husband and Milena died in a car crash in circumstances that haven’t been explained.’

‘That’s not true,’ said DI Carter.

‘And then Milena’s work partner is murdered. There must be a connection.’

‘Oh, for fuck’s sake,’ said Ramsay. ‘I started off saying you ought to talk to a lawyer, but you really need a psychiatrist.’

‘I’m seeing one, as a sort of grief counselling.’

‘I’m surprised he lets you walk the streets.’

‘She.’

‘I don’t fucking care.’

‘I haven’t told her the details of all of this.’

Ramsay threw his hands up in exasperation. ‘What’s the point of a psychiatrist if you’re not telling her the truth? And, furthermore, if you’re lying to your own doctor, why the hell should I believe you’re not lying to us now?’

‘It wouldn’t be much of a lie, would it?’ I said. ‘I don’t come out of it very well.’

‘I’m not so sure about that,’ said Ramsay. ‘Quite a few coppers would be happy enough to charge you immediately but you’d get off with an insanity plea – deranged widow runs amok.’

‘You forget,’ I said. ‘I don’t care.’

‘Your not caring is a big part of the problem.’

‘What I mean is that I don’t care what happens to me.’

Ramsay leaned forward and switched off the machine. ‘I can honestly tell you there’s a bit of me that would like to toss you into a cell right now for fucking us around the way you have. I can tell you that judges do not like people who get in the way of inquiries. If we charged you now, you’d be facing six months inside, a year if you pulled the wrong judge – and that’s just for not coming forward sooner. I don’t need to tell you there are more serious considerations at stake here. Murder, Ms Falkner. Murder.’