Even if I had left her room to argue, she didn’t have the energy. After a moment she said, “Another time. I can see him another time?”

“I’m sure we can work something out,” I said, and held out my arm again. This time Fiona moved, out of the circle of lamplight and into the shadows, towards the door of HQ.

One of the interview rooms is set up to be gentle: carpet instead of linoleum, clean pale-yellow walls, non-institutional chairs that don’t leave your arse bruised, a watercooler, an electric kettle and a basket of little sachets of tea and coffee and sugar, actual mugs instead of foam cups. It’s for victims’ families, fragile witnesses, suspects who would take the other rooms as an affront to their dignity and stalk out. We put Fiona there. Richie settled her—it was nice, having a partner who could be trusted with someone that shaky—while I went down to the incident room and threw a few bits of evidence into a cardboard box. By the time I got back, her coat was on the back of her chair and she was curled around a steaming mug of tea like her whole body needed warming. Without the coat she was slight as a child, even in the loose jeans and oversized cream cardigan. Richie was sitting opposite her, elbows propped on the table, halfway through a long reassuring story about an imaginary relative who had been saved from some dramatic combination of injuries by the doctors at Jenny’s hospital.

I slid the box unobtrusively under the table and took a chair next to Richie. He said, “I was just telling Ms. Rafferty, her sister’s in good hands.”

Fiona said, “The doctor said in a couple of days they’re going to lower the dose of painkillers. I don’t know how Jenny’s going to cope. She’s in really bad shape anyway—obviously—but the painkillers help, half the time she thinks it’s just a bad dream. When she comes off them, and the whole thing hits her … Can they give her something else? Antidepressants, or something?”

“The doctors know what they’re at,” Richie said gently. “They’ll help her get through.”

I said, “I’m going to ask you to do something for us, Ms. Rafferty. While you’re here, I need you to forget about what happened to your family. Put it out of your mind; just concentrate, one hundred percent, on answering our questions. Believe me, I know that sounds impossible, but it’s the only way you can help us put this man away. This is what Jenny needs from you right now—what they all need from you. Can you do that for them?”

This is the gift we offer them, people who loved the victims: rest. For an hour or two they get to sit still and—guilt-free, because we gave them no choice—stop hurling their minds on the jagged shards of what happened. I understand how immense that is, and how priceless. I saw the layers in Fiona’s eyes, like I’d seen them in hundreds of others’: relief, and shame, and gratitude.