‘She claims she remembers nothing at all beyond talking to her friend April.’ Jonah tried to squeeze the rest of his sandwich further up the cardboard pack and then swore as one of the pieces of bread slid up and out, landing in his lap.

‘I’ve got baby wipes,’ Hanson said. ‘You can have some once we get there.’

‘Thanks,’ Jonah said, with a wry grin. ‘I clearly need some kind of nanny.’

‘Oh, don’t worry about it,’ Hanson answered, cheerfully. ‘I’m the same. You’d be amazed how much a baby wipe will clean off. I actually sometimes worry about what they put in them.’ She took another mouthful, chewed thoughtfully and said, ‘She remembers nothing? As in, there’s a complete blank?’

‘Yes. From when she was at the club with April, who snogged some other guy, until the morning, or so she says.’ Jonah shook his head. ‘There’s clearly a lot she’s hiding. I need to find some way of pushing her, but it’s going to be hard getting anything past her solicitor.’

There was a brief silence from Hanson, and then she said, ‘But maybe she really can’t remember anything.’

Jonah glanced at her. ‘Because of how drunk she was?’

‘Yes, or because her drink was spiked.’ She was gazing somewhere towards the dashboard, obviously thinking this over. ‘What if it was nothing to do with Alex, and he just walked her home? Then somewhere down the line she freaked out and thought he was trying to attack her.’

Jonah considered. ‘There’s some point to that.’ He nodded. ‘Let’s get a blood test.’

He put a call through to Lightman, asking him to get Louise Reakes’s consent to blood testing.

‘Sure,’ Lightman replied. ‘And while you’re on the line, you might want to ask Issa Benhawy about the messages he sent his husband in the early hours of the morning.’

‘Are they aggressive?’

‘I’d say so,’ Lightman replied. ‘And one of them strongly implies that Alex had form for going home with other people. I’ll send Juliette some screenshots. I’m not surprised he was keen to get Alex’s phone back untouched.’

He heard a quiet ‘Wow,’ from Hanson a few moments later as the screenshots arrived on her phone.

‘Interesting stuff?’

She read out three messages in turn, the last Issa’s vicious threat to end it if Alex had gone home with a ‘slut’.

Jonah took this in, lining it up with everything else they had so far. Alex had died in Louise’s bed. That much was certain. Issa had accused his husband of sleeping with somebody else. In isolation Jonah would have assumed he meant another man. But the term ‘slut’ could be applied to someone of either gender.