Louise gave a long sigh. ‘I think I remember someone chasing me. Not him. Not Alex. But it’s a dream, so maybe it was meant to be him. I knew they were a threat, and they kept coming, and I kept falling.’ She gave a sudden, loud sniff, and then continued with an unsteady voice. ‘I fell, and they were suddenly on top of me, hurting me. There was – there was a pain in my back, and when I woke up and looked in the mirror, there was a bruise where – where I remembered it.’

‘OK,’ Jonah said, with some satisfaction. He felt instinctively that she was telling them the truth. ‘It’s important that a female officer photographs any bruising. Any injuries at all.’

‘I know.’ Louise’s cheeks were wet with tears again.

He watched her, briefly, as she rubbed at one of her cheeks. ‘You said you fell onto the grass. Was there anything else to your surroundings?’

‘Trees,’ she said, indistinctly. ‘I thought there were trees. But I don’t – I don’t think I was in the woods, after a night out. I don’t think that’s right.’

Jonah glanced at Lightman, who was writing notes with unusual energy. He suspected that Lightman’s thoughts mirrored his own. That with a large blank in her memory it was possible she’d ended up almost anywhere.

‘Was there anyone else, in the dream?’

Louise’s expression grew distant. She tried to speak, swallowed, and then said, ‘I don’t know. There could have been someone else. At some point in the evening someone was angry. Maybe with me, or maybe – maybe I just saw a fight. But I don’t – I don’t know. None of it’s clear.’

Jonah nodded. ‘That’s all right. And what else was there? You said you remembered a few fragments?’

Louise paused for quite some time, her eyes on her hands, before she said, ‘I think I talked to the victim. In the club. I don’t know how long for. I just have this memory of his face as he’s saying something and I have no idea what it was.’ She gave Jonah an anguished look. ‘I only remembered that this morning. I’m sorry.’

Lightman glanced at Jonah, and then asked, ‘You think this was after your friend April had left?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘And what else?’

‘Nothing else.’ She sounded dejected rather than combative. ‘I’m sorry.’

Jonah waited a moment before he asked, ‘You mentioned that Alex Plaskitt might have tried to rob you.’

‘I wouldn’t have hurt him,’ Louise said, immediately.

‘And yet you tried to hide his death,’ Jonah argued. ‘That was not the action of an innocent person.’

‘I told you –’

‘Who were you covering up for, Louise?’ he asked, cutting across her, his voice steely.

Louise looked upwards, as if trying to find strength somewhere. ‘I didn’t know what I was covering up. I panicked.’