April gave a short laugh. ‘Not really, honey. Except his name was Adam, I don’t have much.’

‘You went back to his house?’

‘Yeah, I did. It was just a little fun. Dan and I’ve been having troubles. Like some others.’

‘Do you have an address for the house?’

‘Hell no,’ April said. ‘I got a cab there with him, and I made him call me a cab after, too.’ She shrugged. ‘It was somewhere this side of town is all I know. Kind of a nice place.’

Lightman gave a vague smile, thinking that this meant no provable alibi for the time of Alex Plaskitt’s death. And regardless of what Niall Reakes was hiding, April Dumont was still a suspect.

Lightman watched her for a moment, and then said, ‘I’m a little confused, if I have to be honest, about your behaviour.’ He let her turn round and face him before he went on. ‘You clearly feel protective towards Louise. And yet you apparently left her while she was extremely drunk.’ He tipped his head slightly to one side. ‘It seems out of character that you simply abandoned her.’

April’s expression dropped. She looked deeply uncomfortable, and slightly angry. ‘I didn’t just abandon her. I was – I was drunker than I should have been. I’d been there for her, helping her, you know.’ She looked at him with eyes that were slightly reflective, even in that bright light. ‘I got her water and I hugged her when she looked like she might cry. And I tried to help look for her drivers’ licence for a good twenty minutes. I did all the things a good friend does, up until I got too drunk and forgot I was supposed to be looking after her.’

Lightman studied her for a moment. ‘She lost her driving licence? In the club?’

‘Yeah,’ April said. ‘She not tell you? She’d had it out ready, because she looks awful young when she’s dressed up, and then later she realised she didn’t have it any more.’

‘And did you ever find it?’ he asked.

‘No,’ April said, shaking her head. ‘No, it stayed lost.’

‘OK,’ Lightman said, writing that down. He wondered, briefly, whether Alex Plaskitt had found it.

‘So tell me what motivated you to leave with this man.’

‘Because fuck Dan if he was going to be an asshole.’

‘I believe that this Adam wasn’t the first man you’d had some kind of romantic liaison with that evening,’ Lightman said, quietly.

He had expected an expression of surprise or anger, but April gave an immediate smile of amusement. ‘Romantic liaison? Who in the hell talks like that?’

‘Just us,’ Lightman replied, smiling slightly in return. ‘As far as we know, you kissed someone else that night.’

April shook her head, still grinning. ‘Yeah, I did. Tall, upper-class kind of a guy with a six-pack. Who wouldn’t have?’