“Right. Frankie entered through the back door,” Banks went on. “He’s an ex-boxer and can look like a terrifying figure with all his scar tissue and so on, especially to a young lad, I should imagine. Anyway, Samir got scared and ran off through the front door and turned right, toward the park at the bottom of Elmet Hill. That was the last we could find out about his movements until we interviewed Chris Myers and Jason Bartlett. It turns out they’re the best of friends, and they both enjoy the occasional joint, so they’d got in the habit of heading down to the park after dark and smoking up in the bushes. There was never anyone around in the park at that time, they said, and they were pretty well hidden from the main path and Cardigan Drive. After that, it all happened so fast, Chris Myers told us. Samir came bursting from the trees and startled them. Without thinking, Jason just reacted, got out his knife and lunged. He might have thought Samir was carrying a weapon, but there’s no evidence of that, despite what he says. He was stoned, too, so his senses were befuddled. And it was dark. He saw a dark-skinned guy, and with all that was going around in his head at the time, he just lashed out. Sadly, he did it with a very sharp knife and managed to puncture Samir’s aorta.”

“Christ,” said Joanna. “What a story. I suppose they panicked then?”

“That’s right. They couldn’t revive Samir, and after a while they figured out he was dead. They couldn’t very well leave him there, either. Much too close to home. It was Chris’s idea, apparently, to move him, so he got his car and parked it in a lay-by on Cardigan Drive right next to the bushes. They got Samir in the boot without anyone seeing and thought it would be best to dump him on the East Side Estate, where they thought the police would expect to find someone like him.”

“A drug dealer? Did they know him? Did they buy drugs from him?”