He settled himself at the large wooden table, putting the box of balls down carefully on the floor. While Jonah and Hanson pulled out chairs, he looked on calmly. Patiently.

‘I’m very sorry to have to break the news,’ Jonah said, ‘but Alex was found dead in the early hours of this morning.’

There was a long moment while Step seemed to process this. And then he said, ‘Oh, Jesus.’ He looked away. ‘How did it happen? Was he robbed?’

‘It seems not,’ Jonah told him. ‘As yet, it’s unclear what happened. We wondered if you could help by telling us about yesterday evening.’

‘Sure,’ Step said. ‘I … God, it might all be my fault.’ There was little emotion in his expression, but Step paused again as if working this through internally. ‘I went home and left him. I knew he was a bit drunk, but I … maybe he was too drunk to look after himself.’

‘Can you tell me where the two of you went?’

‘I’m sorry,’ Step said, lifting a hand towards his head and then letting it fall. ‘A gig. A friend’s band was playing at the Porterhouse. And then we went to Blue Underground.’

‘That’s a bar?’

‘A club,’ Step told him. ‘On London Road. Further up past the Wetherspoons?’

Jonah knew London Road well, at least as it had once been. He had spent months doing circuits of the pubs up there at seventeen, eighteen, nineteen. Back when his friends had been in feverish pursuit of university girls, and had abandoned their traditional stomping ground around the quay in order to track them down. There had been clubs back then, too, each of them attempting to seduce those same university girls just as feverishly, because where the women went, the men would follow. And so the road had been awash with laminated boards from nine o’clock onwards. Two Malibu and Cokes for a quid. Two-for-one Blue Lagoons. Free entry for ladies before eleven.

That part of it probably hadn’t changed, even if the prices had.

‘How long were you there?’ he asked Step.

‘We went at about ten thirty, and I was there until … twelve? Maybe just before?’ Step swallowed hard. ‘I had to get back. It’s Lisa’s birthday today. We had a lot of prep to do for the party.’

‘You weren’t to know,’ Jonah said, quietly. ‘What was Alex doing when you left?’

Step lifted his head. ‘He was dancing. In the – in the eighties room.’

‘With anyone?’

‘No.’ Step shrugged. ‘He generally just dances by himself. He loves it. He’s a great dancer.’ And then Step tailed off, halted by the inevitable clash between tenses; between someone who is and, quite suddenly, someone who was.

‘He definitely wasn’t talking to anyone else?’

Step thought for a while and then said, ‘No. No, he was definitely on his own.’

‘Had he … talked to anyone earlier in the evening?’