They both shook their heads slowly, looked at me like I was a kitten killer, the lowest piece of scum who’d ever sat in front of them. It was exactly how everyone had looked at me back then, when I’d been found out.

‘I was a different person back then,’ I said, thumping the table. ‘I was a kid, one who’d just lost his parents. I was fucked up, confused. Terrified of going in that car.’

‘I understand that, Andrew,’ Moseley said. He was a few years younger than me but he talked to me like I was the guilty sixteen-year-old liar I’d been that Christmas. ‘But in our job, you know what we see more than anything? Patterns of behaviour. People who do the same things, make the same mistakes, over and over again. This is your nature. You fuck up, and you blame someone else. You make accusations. You know what else I think, why you came to us in the first place? You want to get rid of this girlfriend of yours, Charlotte, but you’re too much of a coward to go about it the manly way. So instead of telling her you don’t want to be with her anymore, you go extreme and decide to get her arrested.’

‘No . . .’

‘You saw a way of killing two birds with one stone.’ He smiled at his own joke.

‘I want a solicitor,’ I said.

‘Oh really? Very well. Duty solicitor OK, or have you got your own?’

‘Duty,’ I said quietly.

‘All right. We’ll arrange something.’

He knocked on the door of the interview room and a uniformed constable came in.

‘Put Mr Sumner here in a holding cell,’ Moseley said. ‘We’re postponing our little chat.’

‘Am I allowed a phone call?’ I said.

He rolled his eyes. ‘We’ll arrange that too.’

‘Listen,’ I said, before they escorted me from the room. ‘Have you talked to Harold, the old man in the ground floor flat? He can verify what I’m saying. He’ll tell you how shocked I was when I heard that Karen was dead. You need to go round there.’

‘We have,’ Moseley said, his voice flat.

‘And? What did he say?’

‘He didn’t say anything,’ said Jones from behind me. I turned around and thought the look she was giving me might turn me to stone. ‘He’s dead.’

I stared at her. ‘Harold?’

‘Trying to pretend you didn’t know?’

I swung round to face Moseley. ‘It must have been Charlie. She did it to stop him talking. Must have thought he’d seen her. When did you find him? How long has he been dead? Oh my God.’

That poor old man. The dark spirit that he had warned me about, that had been following me around – well, now it had visited him. Yet again, it was my fault.

‘We thought you might be able to tell us that,’ Moseley said.