‘There was someone waiting for him outside. I didn’t see who it was. He took the watch off and put it on a shelf and I thought, you know what? There are still plenty enough people in the house. He’ll know it was me, but he’ll never be able to prove it. And it really made me smile to think of him losing it, his precious Rolex. I didn’t keep it, by the way. I threw it in the sea.’ He pointed. ‘It’s out there.’

‘You really hated him that much?’

‘You have no idea what that man did to me – at Westland College. How much he hurt me.’

‘So tell me.’

‘I can’t.’

Hawthorne was pitiless. ‘You have to, Marc. We only have your word for it that he left that watch on a kitchen shelf. You could have taken it off his wrist after you’d killed him.’

Charles le Mesurier had worn his watch on his right hand, the same hand that had been left untied.

‘I didn’t kill anyone!’ Marc rasped. ‘What sort of person do you think I am?’

‘That’s what I’m trying to find out.’ Hawthorne paused. ‘Tell me about Westland College.’

‘I’ve never talked about it. Not in my entire adult life.’

‘Charles le Mesurier can’t hurt you any more.’

‘There’s nothing left to hurt.’ Marc Bellamy had begun to cry. I was shocked. It wasn’t just the demolition of the man, in this bright morning sunlight. It was the fact that Hawthorne and I had been the cause.

We waited in uncomfortable silence until he had contained himself.

‘Westland was a minor independent school outside Chichester,’ he began. ‘I told you. I was sent there in 1983, when my dad got posted to the south coast. I was eight years old. Do you have any idea what those places were like back then? It was a bloody bear pit. I’d been perfectly happy up in Halifax. Ordinary school, ordinary friends. I never knew what was going to hit me when I walked in. Boarding school, dormitories, tuck shop. Even the uniform made me feel like a pillock. The teachers were ignorant bastards. The food was fucking horrible.

‘But the worst of it was the other boys. If you were going to survive with that lot, you had to be one of them and if you weren’t, they knew it in seconds. They’d come from the right homes – rich parents, nannies – and it was like their whole life they were prepared for that sort of place. There was a pack mentality and I felt it the moment I arrived, like some bloody sacrificial lamb. I was small for my age. I could have had the word PREY tattooed on my forehead.