‘Whatever. It’s the same, no matter what you call them. But if it happens here, some entrepreneur like me taking advantage of cheap labour to run a going concern, then people get all outraged. What a scandal, they say. It’s practically slavery. All that sort of crap. But those workers live a lot better here than they do in Bangladesh, you know.’

‘Or Slovakia.’

‘Slovakia?’

‘Don’t you remember a woman called Nadezda Halak? She was from Slovakia.’

He shook his head. ‘I don’t remember their names, for heaven’s sake. They got their wages in cash, and we provided accommodation, but that’s as far as our obligations went. They didn’t stay around for long, any of them. They’d get a toe-hold in this country, or in the UK, and off they’d go to work in a sandwich factory or something. We were providing a service, really. The government ought to have been giving us a grant.’

‘You were using these people to manufacture illegal drugs, at great risk to themselves,’ pointed out Fry. ‘There’s no way you can even attempt to justify that.’

‘We all take risks in life,’ said Rourke. ‘If we think it’s worth it. Don’t you take risks, in your job?’

‘The difference,’ said Fry, ‘is that I know what risks I’m taking.’

With the tapes turning slowly, Raymond Sutton talked. He didn’t appear to be talking to Hitchens and Cooper, or even to the tape recorder, but to some voice inside his own head – a voice which seemed to be answering him at times.

‘When you’re young, you don’t think you’re ever going to die,’ he said. ‘But sometimes, when you’re old, it can’t come too soon.’

Cooper leaned towards Sutton. ‘Your brother, Derek – you remember we talked about his superstitions?’

‘Eh?’

‘Derek had some funny beliefs, didn’t he? You said he was a bit fey, like your mother.’

‘You never knew our mother.’

‘You told me, Mr Sutton. Remember?’

Cooper wanted to take hold of his arm and shake it until the old man remembered. Though he held himself under tight control, Sutton seemed to read the shadow of a threat in his face and flinched away.

‘All kinds of bad luck came along. But it was only to be expected. It was what I warned them all about.’

‘What do you mean?’

Sutton stared at him. ‘The bad luck. All those disasters. Derek said there would be bad luck when Billy left the farm. He said it had been known for generations. There was a terrible row when I chucked Billy out.’

‘You got rid of the skull?’

‘Yes. Damned thing. It was damning us all. I told Derek, it was an evil thing, and it had to go. The house was cursed, cursed by the Devil, and my brother was one of his dupes. It had to go.’

‘There must have been arguments.’