They look at one another again but say nothing. Blake opens the file and pulls out a photograph.

‘Is this the man you saw?’ she says, pushing the picture over to me.

The photograph is blurred like a still image from a video. I wonder whether there is CCTV somewhere that captured him. I look carefully at the face. It’s the man I saw earlier this evening, without a doubt.

‘That’s him,’ I say. They make tiny movements of their eyes towards one another.

‘Why haven’t you picked him up?’ I say. ‘Why is there no police presence there at all?’

And then I see the discomfort in their faces. Blake gives me a concerned smile. ‘Actually, Xander, he’s not a suspect.’

‘But the picture,’ I say, pointing at the image. ‘It’s him.’

‘It’s a still from the officer’s body-worn camera,’ Conway says.

‘So, you spoke to him. Someone spoke to him, surely? How did he explain the body? You must have had a team there. Forensics. You can’t have let him go. He killed her!’ My voice is climbing, no matter how hard I try to ground it.

‘Just calm down for a second, Mr Shute. Okay. Mr Ebadi. He’s a UAE national,’ Conway says, pointing to the image.

UAE? Did that make him Arabic? If he was Arabic I would have noticed. Wouldn’t I? But the context maybe confused me. He is light-skinned. I saw him in a Victorian house with a white woman and I just assumed – wrongly assumed. Even so, this is him.

‘So?’ I say, finally taming my voice.

‘So, you didn’t mention that he was an Arab gentleman,’ Conway says. ‘In your statement, you said it was a white male.’

I look at Blake in disbelief. ‘But light-skinned or white, what’s the difference? He murdered a woman.’

‘Well, we don’t believe he did,’ Conway says, pulling the photograph back.

‘He’s got an alibi for the night of the murder,’ Blake says softly.

‘What alibi?’

‘He wasn’t in the country, Mr Shute. He was in the UAE.’ I detect delight in his voice as if he has caught me in something, a lie.

‘Anyone can – could say that, have you checked?’

‘Mr Shute, we have checked. We’ve seen his passport, he was good enough to show it to us. And his flight e-ticket,’ Conway says flatly. ‘We spoke to the airline. It wasn’t him.’

I cover my head with my hands as my head begins to pound. It had to be him. It was him, wasn’t it? Suddenly I am not sure any more. Maybe it was a white male I saw after all. I had it right first time around before they tricked me into this odd admission.

‘Then it wasn’t him. It was a white male as I said.’

They look again at one another.