‘Yes, Superintendent. I was hoping you’d got a minute. I’ve brought my lad in. Brooklyn.’

‘What’s happened to him?’

‘Not happened exactly, but I think you could maybe have a word with him – only you look as if you’re off out.’

‘It’ll keep ten minutes.’ Serrailler looked at the boy. ‘Let’s go up to my office.’ He would have seen anyone else in an interview room, for speed and convenience, but not someone looking so cowed and scared and much younger than his age.

He asked Vince to sit on the other side of his office and he would also have asked him not to say anything but Vince had already started.

‘You know what this is all about, what he did, all about Fats, and I said to him that you’d make him see the harm that man could have done, because it’ll have more effect coming from you, I can go on until I’m blue in the face but I doubt he listens – or any of them come to that. He has –’

‘Right, Vince, I get it. Come over by the window, Brooklyn. You can sit down, it’s OK.’

The boy looked quickly at his father, then did so, swivelling the chair to and fro, then all the way round. Simon let him do it a couple of times, then said, ‘Now stop, it’ll make you sick – and me.’ He pulled his own chair away from the desk, closer to Brookie.

‘This isn’t a telling-off, and it’s not a cross-examination, don’t look so worried, but I do want to ask you one thing, if that’s OK?’

He waited. Brookie realised he was actually being asked for a reply. He nodded.

‘Thanks. It’s this. When you first met the man who gave you a lift home because you’d missed the bus, did he ask you any questions?’

‘What about?’ The voice was almost a whisper.

‘Anything.’

‘No. Don’t think so. '

‘Did he talk about himself – where he lived, what he was doing at the school?’

‘No. Oh, yeah, he said he’d taken his daughter’s homework in or something. She was off ill.’

‘Did he tell you her name?’

‘Can’t remember.’

‘Did he tell you his own name?’

‘Said it was Fats and I said nobody was called that but he said he was.’

‘He gave you a lift another time, didn’t he?’

Nod.

‘Was it after the first time that he gave you a phone?’

‘Next time. I think it was. It was in the rucksack.’

‘Did he say why he’d given it to you?’

‘No. It wasn’t –’

‘What?’

Brookie shrugged.

‘It was just a present?’

‘I suppose.’

‘How much do you know about drugs? Dope and coke, those sorts of drugs.’

‘A bit.’

‘Tell me what.’

Now he did not glance at his father but looked straight at Serrailler, for the first time.