‘The murder I caught last week at the motel.’

He frowned. ‘The body in the tub?’

‘Yeah.’

‘We already cleared that.’

‘Well, we found out who handled the acid.’

‘Like I said, we filed on it already.’

‘Klein was in that motel room when it happened; he almost certainly emptied the acid into the tub, because his prints are all over the containers. But he was there under duress. I’ve got together a working theory that, whoever was with him, was threatening to hurt Donald Klein’s mother as a way to force Klein to –’

‘Are you kidding me, Kader?’

She paused. ‘His mother’s got type 1 diabetes.’

‘And?’

‘And they’re close. He really cared for her.’

‘So? So what?’

‘So that, combined with his personality, makes him easy to manipulate –’

Hayesfield held up a hand, stopping her.

‘I want you to think carefully about what you say next.’

Jo looked at him, confused.

‘LT, I’m not sure I underst–’

‘I want you to think really carefully about what you’re going to say, okay?’ He returned his hand to the desk. ‘Because I promise you, Kader: if I don’t like the sound of what comes out of your mouth next, you’ll be clearing your fucking desk.’

30

It was late, the clocks in the cottage reading 11 p.m., the windows showing nothing but absolute darkness. Upstairs, I collapsed on to the bed, my laptop still in my hands. I was tired, fried from hours of sitting in front of a screen and staring at the collage of photographs, cuttings and theories I’d tacked to the walls of the living room. But I wanted to finish going through Beatrix Steards’s casework before I tried to sleep, because I knew, if I didn’t, I’d never drop off.

The background information on Adrian Vale in Beatrix’s file was thin on the ground, the result of a phone call that DS Smoulter had made to the Home Office – and then to King’s College – five days after the disappearance, but it managed to fill in some gaps. He discovered that Vale had been born on 2 November 1964 and that his parents were both from Honduras: it meant his first name was pronounced Adri-ahn and his surname Vah-lay, but from what I could tell, no one, including him, appeared to have bothered correcting people in the UK who assumed Adrian was the anglicized version and Vale rhymed with male. He’d grown up as an only child in a house on St Louis Street in Boyle Heights, which, I found out via the web, was a 1.2-mile road, running north to south, from the I-10 to the bottom of Hollenbeck Park in central Los Angeles.

Los Angeles.