‘I highly doubt if he would even remember that call,’ Mills said, looking at the prone figure on the floor. ‘He was so consumed by that case, and we only ever talked to him on the phone.’ That explained why Healy had never mentioned knowing Mills when his name had come up: not only because the call from Mills’s team had happened almost a decade ago, but because it came in the midst of a search for a child killer, a search that was going nowhere, that remained unsolved for over three years, and that Healy was being crushed under the weight of, even back then. He didn’t know Mills. He barely recalled anything from that period except loss.

Mills’s gaze came back to me.

‘Anyway,’ he said, and stopped again.

And then something weird happened.

‘I don’t know exactly what my point is.’ His eyes fixed on mine, and I knew straight away it was a lie. He knew exactly what his point was. All of this, the whole account of how he’d landed the murder of the family in Preston, had been a prelude, a lead-in to the revelation that he knew it was Colm Healy lying on the floor between us, not Bryan Kennedy, and that if I ever asked another question about Black Gale, if I pinned another piece of paper to a wall, he wouldn’t only dig into my cases and expose my sources, he would tell the world that Healy wasn’t dead. I would lose my freedom, my cases, my oxygen.

I would go to prison.

‘That hack McCaskell is on to something,’ he said, his words not matching his eyes again, his voice not aligning with his expression, ‘and whoever this is lying here – whatever his actual name, because I haven’t been able to find this Bryan Kennedy anywhere – he’s clearly important enough to land you in trouble, which is why I’m guessing McCaskell is so interested in him.’

I frowned. Why was he pretending he didn’t know Healy’s real name?