It was funny. Five seconds ago, Abbott had been snarling at me not to write about him but now he was giving me his entire life story. Speaking in a low voice, fixing me with his malevolent gaze . . . he let it all pour out.

‘All that stuff the police said about me, it was lies, every word of it. Yes, I travelled in Thailand and Cambodia and the Philippines. That was where the factories were. The printing presses. But when you’re making money, you make enemies. Anyone will tell you that. People made up stuff about me and the police swallowed it hook, line and sinker because they wanted to – even though they were never able to prove a single word of it. Two years they investigated me. Oh, yes – and they had their trips to Bangkok and Siem Reap too. They enjoyed those! Do you know how many thousands of pounds of tax payers’ money they spent pursuing me? They got nothing! So that’s why they planted the evidence against me. They put that stuff on my computer to justify their own incompetence and corruption. Do I look stupid to you? Do I look like the sort of person who’d keep kiddie porn on his hard drive? Of course not! They were wrong to start the investigation and they knew it, and they brought me down because if they hadn’t it would have been their own jobs on the line.’

He went on like this for some time and I could write down a whole lot more of it. But after a while I found myself losing focus and I might as well have been listening to the drone of a mosquito. What did I think of Derek Abbott? The truth is that I understood why Hawthorne had been reluctant to let me come into the house and part of me wished I had taken his advice. Don’t let him get under your skin. That was what he had said – and it was exactly what Abbott had done. I won’t say that he was evil, but he was, undoubtedly, one of the most unpleasant people I had ever met and the more he talked, the more I believed the version of events that Hawthorne had described when we stood below The Lookout on the edge of Saye Beach.

Hawthorne himself was still sitting at the table, his face utterly blank as Abbott continued his monologue.

‘Everything I had was taken away from me,’ he was saying. ‘My business. My savings. My reputation. My life. I was locked up with animals – real animals – for six months and every single day I was threatened and degraded. I will never go back to prison. I don’t care what happens to me in my life, but I will never let that happen again. Every minute of that place was like death to me.