‘Do you have anyone we can call?’ asked Chandler.

‘No,’ said Gabriel abruptly. The bonhomie that Chandler had tried to engender between the two of them fled. The subject of family seemed to have touched a nerve.

‘No family?’ asked Chandler, plunging in deeper.

The response was a slow shake of his head.

‘Why?’ Chandler was pushing his luck, but identifying pressure points so they could be manipulated under questioning was a skill he had nurtured and was a hard one to switch off. Sometimes it angered not only others, but himself.

Gabriel offered him the same cold stare. A stare that suggested Chandler should push no further, so he decided not to. The man had been through enough today without having to spell out why he had no family to call on. In the end, Gabriel saved him the trouble.

‘They’re dead, Sergeant.’

The statement was delivered without emotion, all twitching gone, the nervous energy spent. After the frantic escape, the running for his life, the abuse his body had suffered, it seemed Gabriel had finally shut down.

‘Sergeant,’ he said slowly, the smoothness of his voice coating everything in silk. ‘The one thing we all have in common when born is the need for our parents and the comfort of religion. I was failed by both.’

‘What do you mean?’

Gabriel sighed and closed his eyes. ‘Nothing. A family thing. I’m tired, angry, scared. I just want to sleep.’

Chandler itched to fire more questions but the strings in the marionette opposite had been cut.

He led Gabriel back into the office, an unstable roll to his walk as if battling to remain upright. Tanya joined them, her subtle nod informing Chandler that the recording had been successful.

‘What have we got clothing-wise?’ he asked her.

‘Not much,’ she replied, fishing a shirt from the box of clothes that even the charity shop couldn’t sell. She picked the best of a bad bunch: a stained orange T-shirt with a small fiery logo above the breast.

‘What’s this for?’ asked Gabriel when Chandler handed it to him.

‘To wear.’

‘I have one.’ Gabriel looked at his bloodied top. ‘I don’t want to be an imposition.’

‘You can’t go around town like that. You’ll scare our citizens,’ said Chandler as he led them into the sandstone-walled yard adjacent to the station, towards the police cars.

Gabriel looked at him. Some of the defensiveness had disappeared.

‘I don’t have much, sir. I don’t like to give away anything. Even this shirt.’

Chandler understood the sentiment. As a kid he was fiercely protective of his things. He had even got into a fight with his best friend – long-lost best friend – Mitchell over an old football that had been kicked so many times it was bent out of shape and rolled like Brian East down Prince’s Street on a Saturday night.