Marcelo spun his watch around his wrist. Another slow blink; erasing history he didn’t want to face. ‘I helped set it up. The deal was that he’d sketch out who the major players were. But every time Robert gave one answer to the detective, she asked two more questions. She wanted him in there, still working with the Sabres, which was the catch, because he was only incriminating himself further in an effort to please her, passing along information when he got it. Specifically, she wanted him to find out who was crooked, which officers were on the Sabres’ payroll. She wouldn’t let him out until she had the smoking gun.’

‘By which you mean irrefutable evidence against Holton and his partner? Michael told me the night Robert died was a set-up, so you’re saying these two were the ones Michael needed to incriminate, to have his deal honoured? Maybe he finally had something on them.’

Marcelo shrugged. ‘That’s always been my guess. Robert never showed me any of the evidence – that was between him and his handler. He used to laugh about what they had him doing, said it was some real spy shit. He thought it was pretty cool that he got to be undercover. At the start, anyway.’ Marcelo slid back in his seat, rubbed his hands up and down on his knees and stopped talking for a minute. He was in his memory. He missed his friend.

It was strange to think of my father like that, of him being missed. Did that give him legacy over infamy? Marcelo’s story filled him out just a little from how I knew him. A man who joked about spy shit. A man who had friends. I took Marcelo’s introspection as an opportunity to lean my head back against the wall, close my eyes and try to distance my mind from my throbbing hand.

Undercover. Handler. Spy shit. I turned the words over in my head. I’d written one of my how-to guides on spy novels, so I knew a little tradecraft from Ludlum and le Carré, but it hadn’t sold very well.

‘That’s all I have.’ Marcelo’s voice wormed its way into my meditation.

‘Is it?’ I kept my eyes shut, hoping that my half-dead appearance was non-threatening enough to spur a further confession. Marcelo didn’t bite, so I applied some extra pressure. I was technically a lawyer now after all; it gave me permission to be ruthless. ‘You knew about all this during Michael’s trial. You used Alan’s history to manipulate the prosecution, knowing that they’d rather suppress the information than deal with his sordid history in open court. That’s why no one probed Michael’s large withdrawal or tried to find the money, why no one pushed the oddness of the gunshot.’

‘What money?’