Geoffrey Swaby touched my leg under the table and fractionally shook his head.

‘It looks like mine,’ I said, again ignoring him.

I noticed that the phone’s screen now had a crack right across the middle, probably caused by my having thrown it across the storeroom towards where Asquith had been standing with his gun.

‘Please unlock the phone,’ the detective asked.

I leaned forward and touched it. It immediately lit up with my home page of a photo of Marina and Saskia that I had taken the previous Christmas. I was relieved to see that its trip across the storeroom didn’t appear to have broken anything other than the screen.

I entered my four-digit unlocking code.

The detective leaned forward to take the phone back but I snatched it up.

‘Mr Halley,’ he said, angrily. ‘Give me the phone.’

‘In a minute,’ I replied. ‘I want you to listen to something first.’

The two detectives weren’t happy, but I ignored them and pressed ‘play’ on the voice memo page, also turning up the volume.

‘Good evening, gentlemen.’ My voice emanated from the phone’s speaker in a rather high metallic tone. ‘I think it is high time the three of us had a little talk.’

I put the phone back down on the table, as the ten-minute-long recording of the conversation between Asquith, Valance and myself in the storeroom played back.

Everything was there, including Harry Asquith’s voice proudly describing the mark four Webley revolver as his great-grandfather’s Boer War officer’s sidearm and how a .455 bullet fired from it would take my head clean off my shoulders, right up to the point when I had pulled over the stack of boxes with a crash, and Asquith had fired the first shot. There was even a small bonus exchange between the two of them, occurring after I had escaped out of the door.

‘What do we do now?’ Valance had asked.

‘First we find him and then we kill him,’ Asquith had said quite clearly. ‘Get the flashlights.’

The two could be heard leaving the storeroom, and then all went quiet.

In the silence, I leaned forward and switched off the playback.

The audio file on my phone seemed to change everything. Suddenly, the police couldn’t be more helpful, even if they weren’t being exactly apologetic.

The two detectives halted the interview and they both went out of the room, taking my phone with them, as they left me alone with Geoffrey Swaby, the solicitor.

‘Well, that’s a first,’ he said. ‘Looks like you don’t need me after all.’

He put his leather-covered notebook back into his briefcase.

‘I’m sorry that you’ve made a wasted journey,’ I said.

‘Don’t be. I wouldn’t have missed that for the world.’ He laughed. ‘Did you see the look on their faces when that last bit played? Absolutely priceless.’