‘Do you know that he has recently gone missing? Last night, actually. DI Piper here was on the phone to him as he was kidnapped. He seemed to know his kidnapper…’ Bob trails off and lets silence fill the room.

‘What are you trying to get at here?’ the lawyer asks calmly.

‘What I’m suggesting,’ counters Bob, ‘is that Mr Knox abducted Ed Bennett, dumped the body somewhere and then turned up at Anna’s house in the hope of an alibi.’

‘And what evidence do you have?’

‘We’re working on that,’ says Bob. ‘Now, let’s move on to the evidence we do have at hand. We’ve checked the hammer in the toolbox you had with you when you reappeared. It’s clean. So you’re in the clear there. This however…’ he trails off, lifting a laptop onto the table and opening the lid which awakens the screen.

Bob presses a few buttons and the video of Reuben’s hanging appears. Whilst Rory and his lawyer take in what is happening on the screen, I keep my focus on Rory’s face. He looks uneasy at the sight of Reuben’s bloodied visage and seems confused as to why he is being made to watch this.

The lawyer’s face is frozen in concentration, his keen eyes taking in every second of the footage. When Rory’s voice emanates from the laptop, their facial expressions change. Rory’s head jerks back and his eyes widen in shock at the sound of his own voice. The lawyer is looking at his client out of the corners of his eyes, knowing his job just got that little bit harder.

Rory opens his mouth to speak but the lawyer wags a finger, indicating for him to hold his tongue. I expect the lawyer to sound panicked, but when he speaks after pausing the laptop, his voice is even, measured.

‘I assume you think this proves something?’ he asks.

‘It’s his voice,’ Bob replies, pointing at Rory.

The lawyer shakes his head. ‘It’s a voice that sounds like my client’s. However, anyone could put on an accent and edit it into a video. This proves nothing.’

DCI Bob reaches across and presses play on the video again. Reuben’s pleas fill the room and when the box he’s standing on is kicked from underneath him, Bob pauses the video again.

‘Look at the boot,’ Bob says to Rory. ‘Look familiar?’

Bob reaches below the table and sets a pair of boots on the table.

‘My mother, God rest her soul, always used to say it was bad luck to put shoes on a table, and I guess for you,’ he glances at Rory, ‘it is.’

A muscle in Rory’s jaw twitches, but he remains silent.

‘The boots are a match; we had our tech team look at them last night. Now, these boots were used to kick away the box that was supporting poor Reuben, the prints were also found in some mud near the body of Jason Krist, who Rory also didn’t see eye to eye with, and on Anna’s face. If you look carefully at the video,’ Bob zooms in on the boot, ‘the scuffs on the heel and on the inside toe are identical.’