And then Jo felt the panic set in again. This wasn’t what she thought her first impressions of Adrian Vale would be like. It wasn’t as if she’d expected him to be some snarling animal either; if he was even half as devious as the anonymous caller had made out – if he’d abandoned his girlfriend in the darkness at the top of a mountain trail, if he’d watched from the shadows as she dragged her shattered ankle for a mile and a half back down the slope, if he’d killed a man and left him to liquefy in a tub full of acid, and he’d got away with all three – he was good at hiding who he was: a liar, a killer. So she’d been prepared for some sort of act.

It was more that he carried it off so well.

It was that his display of love appeared so real.

Jo shifted in the armchair and felt her holster move against the top of her right thigh, the weight of the gun against her body. But that was just the thing. It didn’t feel like she’d need it. This situation felt the total opposite of that.

‘You said on the phone that this was about Martina?’ Vale asked, laying his tie next to his jacket, loosening the top button on his shirt and then taking off his waistcoat. It felt even hotter in the living room than when Jo had first arrived.

‘Martina Lopez,’ Jo said, looking down at her notebook. She’d placed it on the coffee table between them, her notes small and difficult to read from where Vale was sitting. Not that he was looking at what she’d written: he was looking at her, his expression completely neutral. His voice had been the same when she’d called him at work earlier. Jo had phoned the house first, because that was the only number she had for him, and then Valeria had given her the number of the law firm in Pico Rivera. Jo looked at Vale. ‘You dated Martina in high school, correct?’

‘Right,’ he responded. ‘For seven months.’

Valeria sat down at the living-room table behind her son.

‘Is Martina okay?’ Vale asked.

Jo studied him, searching for minor giveaways and, when she failed to find anything, looked down at her notes again. In the corner of one of the pages, under Martina’s name, she’d written, DOD 10/13/84. Jo had gone looking for Vale’s ex in the time since the anonymous call and had found her almost instantly: on 13 October 1984, Martina and a friend had been smoking crack in a house the two of them had shared in Boyle Heights, when Martina started to develop breathing problems. She then went into cardiac arrest. Her friend called 911, and Martina was rushed to the ER – but she died before she got to the operating table.

‘Detective Kader?’