Of course, it wouldn’t matter if a thing was true if a Detective Sergeant and his posh cousin stood up in court and denied it. Joel knew exactly what value truth had to a policeman in the witness box. If Fowler said Napier-Fox had never admitted any such caddish thing, and Barbara Wilson gave only Joel’s stupid bloody insight as the reason she’d ended her engagement, he was screwed. Could you be gaoled for slander? He couldn’t remember. He felt cold all over, dizzy with fear, and with Fowler’s betrayal.

Not that he knew the man to call it a betrayal. Maybe he’d panicked him with that stupid fucking flirting: Christ, he was a fool. But still, for Fowler to side with his shitty cousin to the point of telling lies in court—

Joel shut his eyes and took a deep, steadying breath.

He’d had an extremely good look at DS Fowler’s handwriting, and if that man was going to err, it would be on the side of insufferable rectitude. He surely wasn’t going to perjure himself to help a shitty cousin sue; that simply didn’t mesh with anything Joel had seen. Which suggested there was more to this.

“I don’t know about that, Sergeant,” he said, as calmly as he could. “I’m no lawyer. I’ll have to look into the matter. Only, do correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t slander a civil matter?”

He said that with a look of intelligent curiosity, and held it on his face till Hollis said, “Yes, sir, it is.”

“Not the Met’s area, then.”

“No, sir.”

Joel didn’t say anything to that at all. One of the journalists at the paper had advised him, in a moment of slightly inebriated expansiveness, that silence was the greatest weapon. If you were silent in a negotiation or an interview, the other party felt compelled to fill the gap. So he simply stood without a word, keeping his eyes clamped on the policeman’s face despite the head-to-toe social discomfort, setting his back teeth to make himself not speak.

Hollis broke first. “Very well, sir. Just giving you a word to the wise. When people claim they can do the impossible, especially if they make allegations about their betters, that’s a good way to get in a lot of trouble. We keep our eye on that sort of thing.”

“Glad to hear it,” Joel said. “Very responsible. Is there anything else I can do for you? In that case, good afternoon.”

He shut the door behind Hollis, heart thudding. Then he went back to his half-cooked sausages, stared at them for a while, and threw them in the bin. It was a horrible waste of meat, but he’d lost his appetite.