With his voice trapped somewhere down the bottom of his gullet, all Olson could do was nod.

They stopped at the T-junction with the wide, smart residential street of Westbourne Villas, then, very gingerly on the pedal now, Goodman turned right and drove slowly (Thank you, God! Olson thought) up to the next junction, with the wide and relatively busy New Church Road.

‘OK if we head out into some open countryside to exercise her legs?’ Goodman asked.

No, not OK, not at all OK, a voice cautioned inside Larry Olson’s head. But you need the sodding money badly, very badly! another voice in there shouted more loudly.

35

Tuesday 3 September

Alec Butler sat in the tiny, sound-proofed observation room adjoining the interview room in the Brighton custody centre. The DC was watching the proceedings on the monitor, relayed from the single overhead CCTV camera next door.

Having agreed their interview strategy with Grace, Norman Potting and Jon Exton sat on one side of the modern rectangular table, opposite Niall Paternoster, who looked haggard and unshaven, his hair dishevelled, and his solicitor, who had a notebook in a tired leather folder in front of him.

The first interview, last night, had been to establish Niall’s accounts that he had already given to the police. This second interview would continue obtaining Niall’s account, and covering points that had been raised during the investigation to date. A mixture of garnering information and gently probing aspects of the suspect’s story.

Niall was dressed in the regulation police tracksuit which appeared at least one size too big for him. His solicitor looked like he’d slept in his clothes, as he always did.

Alec Butler’s personal opinion of Legal Aid on-call solicitors, already starting from a low base, had descended to even lower depths after the recent discovery that one of Brighton’s most prominent ones had secretly been a major county lines drug dealer.

Touching the screen in front of him to start the interview, Potting glanced up at the clock on the wall. ‘It is 9.43 a.m. Detective Sergeant Norman Potting and Detective Sergeant Jon Exton interviewing Niall Paternoster, under caution, in the presence of his solicitor, Joseph Rattigan.’

They each introduced themselves for the benefit of the recording.

‘Niall,’ Exton began, ‘last night we went through in some detail your account of the movements of you and your wife over the last weekend, leading up to her disappearance at Tesco on Sunday afternoon. This interview will continue dealing with those details and we also need to ask you some additional questions. Can you tell us about where you and Eden were on the weekend of Saturday the twenty-fourth of August?’

Paternoster cleared his throat to compose himself. ‘I’d had an overnight taxi fare from Manchester and didn’t get home until about 10.30 a.m. so I showered and went to bed. I stayed in bed until about 4.30 p.m. Eden had been out to lunch with a work colleague. We stayed in for the rest of the day. On Sunday we spent the day in the garden, I moved some plants, Eden mowed the lawn. I think I washed the car in the afternoon.’ He hesitated. ‘In the evening I listened to some music and Eden was watching episodes of Criminal Minds, some FBI profiler thing she liked.’