‘I guess you haven’t come to hire me,’ I said, ‘so why are you here?’

‘I’m on your side, Ms Falkner,’ he said. ‘You may not think so, but I am.’

‘I wasn’t thinking about it.’

‘It’s just that you make it difficult for someone to be on your side.’

‘You’re a policeman,’ I said. ‘You’re not meant to be on anybody’s side. You’re meant to investigate and find out the truth.’

He looked dubiously at my workbench, then leaned back on it, half sitting. ‘I’m not really here,’ he said. He consulted his watch. ‘I finished work half an hour ago. I’m on my way home.’

‘Do you want a cup of tea?’ I said. ‘Or a drink?’

‘My wife’s waiting at home for me,’ he said, ‘with a drink. Cold white wine, probably.’

‘Sounds nice,’ I said. ‘But if you’re not on duty…’

‘I just wanted to tip you off that things might get a bit messy.’

‘Why do you want to tip me off?’ I said. ‘And why should they get messy?’

‘Obviously it’s all rubbish. You – Well, it sounds stupid even to say the words, but I’m going to anyway. You obviously couldn’t have been involved with the death of your husband, could you?’

I’d been carrying on intermittently with my piece of sandpaper, but now I stopped and stood up. ‘Are you waiting for me to say no?’ I said.

‘You’ve been going around making yourself look suspicious but it still doesn’t work.’

‘It doesn’t work because it isn’t true,’ I said.

‘We don’t work on truth. We work on evidence. Even so. The death of your husband was recorded as an accident. You were the one who was going around screaming that it wasn’t. I’ve tried to think about it as a double bluff, or a triple bluff, but I can’t make it work. And then not only did you claim you didn’t know about your husband’s infidelity, you actually made a bloody… Well, you kept claiming it was all a mistake, that they weren’t even having an affair. Even when you found evidence that they were.’

‘But the evidence doesn’t work.’

‘Evidence is always messy.’

‘Not messy,’ I said. ‘Impossible.’

He was rocking himself back and forth on the bench. ‘You really didn’t know about the affair?’ he said. ‘I mean before your husband’s death.’

‘I don’t believe he was having an affair.’

‘Did you have an argument on the day of your husband’s death?’

‘No.’

Ramsay stood up and walked across the room to look out of the window. ‘Do you need planning permission for a shed like this?’ he asked.

‘No,’ I said.

‘Interesting,’ he said.

‘Is that relevant?’

‘I’ve been thinking of buying one,’ he said. ‘Somewhere to go that’s out of the house. To get back to what I was saying, you’ll notice I’m asking you these questions informally, not taking an official statement. If I had been, it might have seemed I was trying to catch you out.’

‘How?’

‘We’ve been talking to various people.’ He took a notebook from his pocket and flicked through several pages. ‘Including people in your husband’s office. Mr Kelly, for instance, who was in the office that day doing a software update. He said that early on the afternoon of the day your husband died, he heard one end of an argument on the phone between your husband and someone Mr Kelly assumed was you. Perhaps it wasn’t you.’

‘Fergus said that?’

‘Yes.’

‘He’s right. It was me.’

‘You said you hadn’t had an argument.’

‘It wasn’t an important argument.’

‘What was it about?’

‘Something completely trivial.’ Ramsay didn’t reply. He was clearly wanting to hear more. ‘It was about him coming home late.’

‘You had an argument about that?’

‘All our arguments were about trivial things. Oh, for God’s sake, I’ve still got the text he sent me afterwards.’ I picked up my mobile phone and scrolled down to one of the messages I hadn’t been able to delete. I handed the phone to Ramsay. He extracted some reading glasses laboriously from his top pocket and put them on.

“‘Sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry. Im a stupid fool.” That’s a lot of sorries. Do you mind if I take this?’

‘It’s my phone. I need it.’

‘It’ll be returned to you. Pay-as-you-go phones are available in the meantime.’

‘What do you want it for?’

Ramsay put the phone in his pocket. ‘A cynical person would say that your husband doesn’t say what he’s sorry about. He could be sorry that he’s been unfaithful.’

‘He wasn’t unfaithful.’

‘I’m sure you’re right.’

‘Your wine will be getting warm.’

‘I’m not cynical,’ he said. ‘I’m on your side. I know you’ve worked hard to incriminate yourself, but you haven’t done a good enough job. That crash, with your husband and Milena Livingstone. You couldn’t have done that on your own.’

‘Why do you say on my own?’

‘No reason. Besides, who would you do it with? I’ve talked to her husband as well. Her widower. We don’t really say “widower”, do we? I’ve always wondered why. He didn’t seem like someone to arrange a murder. He seemed more like the tolerant type. If you see what I mean.’

‘If you mean do I agree that he didn’t kill his wife, I do.’

‘And your husband.’

‘Well, of course.’

‘And then there’s Frances Shaw.’

‘I didn’t kill Frances!’

‘I’m just playing devil’s advocate here, trying to construct the sort of theory that a hostile person might. It might be seen as an unfortunate coincidence that you worked for the company run by your husband’s lover.’

‘It wasn’t a coincidence,’ I said. ‘And she wasn’t his lover. I was working there to prove that. Or to find the truth.’

‘I mean, how would you really do it?’

‘What?’

‘Kill two people and make it look like an accident.’

‘I thought you were talking about Frances Shaw.’

‘We’ll come to Frances Shaw. I was thinking about the car. How would you do something like that? Tamper with the brakes, the way they do in films?’

‘How do you tamper with brakes?’ I said. ‘Anyway, what would that do, driving in London? You don’t kill two people driving along at thirty or forty miles an hour. At least, not reliably.’

‘Sounds right,’ said Ramsay. ‘So what do you do?’

I broke the promise I had made and made myself think about the event once more as I had hundreds of times before.

‘They would have to be already dead. And you drive them to somewhere quiet…’

‘Like Porton Way,’ said Ramsay.

‘That would be a perfect choice,’ I said. ‘Where you can steer the car over the edge, set fire to it and then get away.’

‘Making sure you don’t leave any traces,’ said Ramsay. ‘Or drop anything.’

‘Do you think I’d have left my scarf behind if I’d committed the murder?’

‘You wouldn’t believe what people leave at murder scenes. False teeth. Wooden legs. I’m sure it’ll never come to this, Ms Falkner, but if you’re ever called upon to construct a defence, I wouldn’t stress the point that leaving evidence at the scene is an argument that you weren’t there.’

‘I was there. I went later.’

‘Obviously the case with Frances Shaw is very different. Traces of your presence were found everywhere at the scene, including on the body.’

‘I worked there,’ I said, ‘and I pulled the body clear. I wasn’t sure she was dead.’

‘That’s what the emergency services are for,’ said Ramsay. ‘They can revive people who might seem completely dead to civilians like you and me.’

‘She was dead.’

‘I believe this argument has been had before. My point was that there’s no doubt you were there, even though you fled the scene. But while there’s obvious motive for you to kill your husband and his lover, even though you couldn’t have done it, there’s no motive at all for you to kill Frances Shaw, is there?’

There was a pause because I didn’t know what to say. I wondered if he knew something and was waiting to catch me out once more. If there was damning evidence – more damning evidence – it was better coming from me. And now was the time to give it. There was a moment when I thought, Why not? I had this feeling that somehow everything was closing in on me, everything was turning out bad. Why not go along with it? What if I was blamed for it, convicted and imprisoned? How did that matter, really? But I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t think of the words with which to say it.