Hanson adjusted her pose, and spoke more quietly. ‘This doesn’t have to be an unmitigated disaster, Niall. You aren’t kingpin in this.’

‘I’d like to speak with my client alone,’ the solicitor said.

‘I didn’t want to get involved,’ Niall said, lifting his head and ignoring her. ‘They entrapped me.’

‘As serious an offence as drug smuggling is,’ Jonah said, ‘we’re only interested in whether it relates to Alex Plaskitt’s death.’

‘Of course it doesn’t!’ Niall said, immediately. ‘There’s a big difference between shipping stuff around and killing someone. I wasn’t even in Southampton on Friday.’

‘Mr Reakes,’ Daniella said sharply, ‘we need to have a conversation.’

And this time, Niall nodded silently. Jonah switched off the tape.

It took the solicitor and her client fifteen minutes to establish that Niall was going to cooperate fully. When Jonah and Hanson returned and ran the tape again, he told them, in great detail, about the new friends he’d met at a conference in Dallas eight years ago. Two wonderful new people who had turned out not to be who he thought they were.

‘They were a GP and his dermatologist wife, they said. They struck up a conversation in the hotel, and they were just so … cool. The kind of people you immediately want as your friends.’

Niall had met up with them again late on the second night of the conference, and they’d fed him a story about her having stage two breast cancer. ‘The one experimental drug that looked like it was going to work wasn’t on the market in the UK yet, which was why they grabbed any opportunity to come to the States. They said they’d been buying it for a fortune and shipping it to the UK, and had ended up with massive debts. They had to find a solution, or they were going to have to sell their house, they said.’ He sighed. ‘Somewhere down the line, I admitted I had debt problems, too. And that I hadn’t told anyone, least of all Dina, who was my fiancée back then.’

It was clear how much Niall hated talking about this, and his shame added to Jonah’s conviction that this was the truth. He signalled for Niall to continue.

‘The wine was flowing and it seemed really … natural to talk about it all. They seemed like they were being so open …’

Jonah nodded. He could imagine it well. Successful hustlers often had a particular ability to connect with people. Or to fake it, at least.