Peter Epstein QC had questioned Price carefully, taking a very different approach to the one he had applied to Keith White the day before. The phone expert’s delivery had been effortless. Today was different. Today Epstein had to control a witness just as eager to speak, but far less skilled at the task.

Most of Price’s evidence matched his witness statement. He explained to the jury how he was a long-term friend of both O’Driscoll and Kash. How the three had been close since school. He also admitted knowing Terry Colliver. Not a close friend, he explained. More a casual acquaintance. A friend of a friend.

Price had gone on to tell the jury of his disgust at his friends’ crime. How their murder of the Galloway twins had been the breaking point in his relationship with them. How they had tortured the brothers, how they had dismembered them and how they had boasted about their crimes.

The pleasure they had taken in what they had done, he explained, was the final straw.

Epstein had taken his questions slowly. He had concentrated on details Price could give of the killings; things that only the murderers could have told him, that he could not have known from anyone or anywhere else.

Epstein had made a point of turning to the jury whenever such a detail came out. Meeting their eyes whenever Price referred to something the jurors had already heard; a detail they would recognise as accurate. The message behind Epstein’s theatrics was clear: how else would the witness know this? Other than from O’Driscoll and Kash?

It was a good performance. But not a perfect one. Price had not been controlled completely. That was not Epstein’s fault. The rules of questioning his own witness prevented Epstein from suggesting the answers, which gave Price more latitude than Epstein would have liked. It was an opportunity to go off-script and Price had seized it time and again by adding evidence that had not appeared in his witness statement.

It was the classic mistake of a witness with an agenda: trying to make things worse for the defendants.

Michael and Cole had shared a glance every time Price had tried to twist the knife in this way. Both had seen this many times before and so they knew what Price was doing. And both knew how counterproductive it really was; how weakened the evidence became by each of these additional lies.

Once Epstein was done, it was Cole’s turn to question Price.

Cole started gently. He made no effort to attack Price and instead seemed to guide him. He took Price to what Cole believed were his lies, from both the original statement and what Price had added today, and confirmed that Price stood by each of them as true. What Cole was doing was undramatic but it was also vitally important. It tied Price to his own dishonesty, leaving him no room to manoeuvre when Cole’s real cross-examination began.

‘Mr Price, you’ve told this jury that you were disgusted by what your friends Darren O’Driscoll and Simon Kash had done to the Galloway brothers. Correct?’