I was on the first page of the interview transcript, looking at the questions from Smoulter and the answers from Adrian Vale. I’d already been over them once – but now I realized I’d missed something.

In the transcript, the three people in the room during Vale’s interview were listed as SMOULTER, VALE and SOLICITOR. But, at the top, in a line along the edge – the point size not just small, almost imperceptible – was a list of their full names: DS Stuart Smoulter. Adrian Garcia Vale.

And then the third.

The name of Vale’s solicitor.

Jacob Pierce.

It took me only a second to place the name, and when I did, I felt a prickle in my scalp. Pierce was the person that Ross had mentioned on the phone to me earlier.

He was the man Isaac Mills worked for.

The man who ran Seiger and Sten.

Clear: Part 2

1985

Los Angeles | Tuesday 30 July

In a flat voice, Hayesfield said, ‘You don’t think Donald Klein’s our killer.’

It was a statement, not a question.

‘No,’ Jo replied. ‘I don’t believe Klein was the one who shot Gabriel Wilzon.’

‘So he helps some asshole fill a tub with acid, watches as this mastermind puts a bullet in the Wilzon kid’s face, and then Klein drives up to Runyon Canyon, goes for a midnight walk and pops one in his own skull because – what? – he feels so guilty?’

‘Or he couldn’t see an end to it.’

‘An end to what?’

‘To the killer threatening his mother.’

‘Klein cares so much for his mom that he blows his brains out?’

‘If he’s dead, he can’t be blackmailed.’

She kept her voice calm, quiet, as if she absolutely believed that she was right, but here, in this moment, as Hayesfield glared at her from across the desk, as she articulated her thoughts for the first time, her certainty began to grey: she was frightened that she’d called it wrong, frightened that the sympathy she’d felt for Ray Callson had helped cloud her judgement; she was frightened that she’d just set herself back months, maybe years, and that all the reservations that had been expressed about her, about her abilities as a cop, about the limitations of her sex – all the things that had been discussed in front of her and behind her back – would now be used as a way to articulate her inadequacy.

‘Look,’ she said, ‘LT, I know it’s not what you want to hear.’

‘You’re damn right it’s not.’

‘There’s just something off –’