The girl said nothing.

The man had a smooth voice, like velvet. “I’m Detective Inspector Me. Unusual name, I know. My family were incredibly narcissistic. I’m lucky I escaped with any degree of humility at all, to be honest, but then I’ve always managed to exceed expectations. You are Kenny Dunne, are you not?”

“I am.”

“Just a few questions for you, Mr Dunne. Or Kenny. Can I call you Kenny? I feel we’ve become friends these past few seconds. Can I call you Kenny?”

“Sure,” Kenny said, slightly baffled.

“Thank you. Thank you very much. It’s important you feel comfortable around me, Kenny. It’s important we build up a level of trust. That way I’ll catch you completely unprepared when I suddenly accuse you of murder.”

Kenny’s eyebrows shot up. “What?”

“Oh dear,” said Inspector Me. “That wasn’t supposed to happen for another few minutes.”

“I didn’t kill Paul Lynch!”

“Could we go back to the nice feeling of trust we were building up?”

“Listen, I had arranged to meet him, I was going to interview him, but when I got there he was already dead.”

“You’d be surprised how often we hear the ‘he was already dead’ defence in our line of work. Or maybe you wouldn’t, I don’t know. The point is, Kenny, it’s not looking good for you. Maybe if you tell us everything you know, we can persuade our colleagues to go easy on you.”

Kenny stared at the man, then looked over at the girl. “Who are you?”

She returned his look, raised an eyebrow, but didn’t answer.

“She’s here on work experience,” said Inspector Me. “Don’t you worry about her, Kenny. You just worry about yourself. What was your relationship with the corpse?”

“Uh,” Kenny said, “I’m a journalist. He’s someone I’d interviewed a few times.”

“About what?”

“It’s… nothing. He is, or he was, a conspiracy nut, kind of.”

“Conspiracies? You mean like government cover-ups, that sort of thing?”

“No, not really. He was more…” Kenny sighed. “Listen, it’s a long story.”

“I don’t have anywhere else to be,” said Inspector Me, and glanced back at the girl. “Do you?”

“Yes, actually,” she said. “I have a christening to get to.”

“Oh,” said Me. “Of course.” He turned back to Kenny. “So maybe if you talk really fast, you can explain it to us.”

Kenny took a moment, deciding on the best way to avoid sounding like a lunatic. “Right,” he said. “For the past few years, I’ve been investigating some oddball stories. Nothing big, nothing major, but stories that get ignored because when you hear them, they sound insane. No newspaper is going to take this stuff seriously, so I can really only devote a small amount of time to them.