The reaction had been slight, and if Tyler hadn’t been watching for it he might have missed it. But he was watching. A small twitch, the slightest tic in the man’s left cheek.

“Why don’t we start with the one at his house the night he disappeared?”

Denham folds his arms across his chest. “I wasn’t there, but I would imagine it was one of Gerry’s poker nights.” The emphasis is unmistakable. “I wasn’t invited to those.”

“But you knew about them?”

Denham’s lips part in a humorless smile. “In my profession it pays sometimes to limit what you know.”

Any concern Tyler might have about badgering this upstanding member of the community evaporates. “You mean you turn a blind eye to anything that compromises you or your client.”

Denham holds out a hand, open-palmed—just so.

“How morally upstanding of you.”

“I don’t particularly like your tone, Detective.”

“Is that right? Well, I don’t particularly like your selective blindness. How far are you involved with your clients’ affairs, Michael? Maybe I should make it my business to look a bit more closely. I wonder what other skeletons I might dig up.”

The choice of words is effective, but Denham is not a man easily intimidated. “You’re skating dangerously close to charges of harassment here, Detective Sergeant.” He’s rattled about something. “Look,” he goes on, somehow managing to convey in that one word a sense that they’re all on the same side. “Gerry wasn’t a saint. Yes, I knew about the parties and the drugs and the whores, but I didn’t have anything to do with that. That was for him and his public-school mates. Our relationship was strictly business. Always.”

“What confuses me, though, Mr. Denham, is why you would allow your daughter to be involved in it? Knowing what Cartwright got up to, didn’t it concern you when Sophie started spending time there?”

The glasses have slipped down again. He pushes them back up. “My daughter makes her own friends. I’m not her keeper.”

Tyler doubts that but he can see Denham frowning, putting together his meaning.

“What’s this about?” Even as he says it, his face drains of color. “Do you have . . . some kind of evidence that he . . . that Sophie was . . .”

Tyler lets a beat go by before putting the man out of his misery. “No, nothing like that.”

Denham breathes out heavily.

“And you can rest assured, Mr. Denham, in my profession we don’t turn a blind eye to things like that.”