‘I’m sure it fucked him up. Me, I don’t give a shit about my ex-husband. Exactly zero feelings.’

‘One day I might reach a similar point with regard to my husband.’

‘Things are bad?’

‘It’s a mess,’ said Emily. ‘Can we talk about the Third of April? Are you sure about this?’

Sophia nodded.

Emily said: ‘Henry Matfield was a regular customer.’

‘He would come in and sit with a coffee and stare at everyone.’

‘When he came to the Lucky’s restaurant on the Third of April, you were in the kitchen, is that right?’

‘I heard a gunshot and a second shot soon after the first and I looked through the kitchen pass and saw Henry. If I’d been on the floor I probably wouldn’t be here. One of the cooks—his name was Chris—he said to me, “Go out the back.” And that’s what I did. I was hiding the whole time and I could hear what was going on—forty-something gunshots.’

‘You hid in a refrigerated room behind the kitchen,’ said Emily. She didn’t want to pop question after question at Sophia for the duration of the interview, but to intermittently bridge the talk with plain statements.

‘That’s what Chris meant by “out the back”. There was no door between the coolroom and the kitchen because we were constantly going back and forth during a shift.’

‘There was a backyard.’

‘There was a tiny outdoor area big enough for a couple of bins. Sometimes the chefs stood out there and smoked. In the yard there was a door into the lane, but I didn’t have the key, and there was barbed wire at the top of the fence. If Henry opened the door to the yard, he would have seen me. And Lucky had an office in that building but the office door was locked. There was also a bathroom: a customer was shot on the toilet. The poor bloke was sitting there on the toilet with his pants down. The coolroom was the best place to hide. It was small. There was no window. Chris was right about that.’

‘You were in there a long time—until the police arrived. I realise this sounds trite, but it’s impossible to imagine what that would have been like. What did you do in the room? From my reading, there’s no detail about what you did in there.’