‘But before that,’ Patrick Perry said, obviously trying not to make her feel like she was being stalked, ‘I called the LA Sheriff’s Department, and then the LAPD, and that was how I eventually found you. To cut a long story short, I’ve been trying to see if I can find out anything more about a man called Adrian Vale.’

Jo blinked, shocked to hear his name after so long.

She hadn’t thought about Adrian Vale for months. She hadn’t looked at the notebook, packed away in one of the drawers in the spare room, for even longer.

But she’d never forgotten.

‘What about Vale?’ she said.

Perry continued: ‘Well, I was shunted around from pillar to post for a while – but then, eventually, I managed to get someone in Cold Cases at the LAPD to do a search for Vale and his name came up in relation to the murder of a man called … uh … Donald Klein. Apparently, you were the last person to add anything to Klein’s file. It was in 2003 – on your last day at the LAPD, I think.’

Jo went to the window and twisted the blinds shut. Her head was banging so hard, white spots were flashing in front of her eyes.

‘Ms Kader?’

‘I remember,’ she said.

And she did: on her last day in Robbery-Homicide she’d told one of her detectives to pull the Klein file for her. Unlike the murder of Gabriel Wilzon, it had never been closed, chiefly because Ray Callson’s parting gift to the casework was a note saying that he didn’t believe Klein was the killer and it wasn’t a murder-suicide. So, while Hayesfield shut the LASD’s half of the investigation down, the LAPD had kept theirs open. No one was working it, no one was likely to work it any more – and any potential evidence was lost in the passage of time – but, even after so long, Jo had still felt that sense of debt to the two dead men: so she’d gone in and entered Adrian Vale’s name as the probable murderer of both. She’d had her doubts about him – and there was never enough evidence to convict – but he’d remained her best, and only, lead. Now, though, none of that seemed to matter. Squeezing her eyes shut, she said, ‘I thought Vale was dead.’

She’d gone looking for him in the months after Ethan left to go to Berkeley, the house she’d shared with Ira and her son in the Valley too overwhelming by then, big and empty and forlorn. Whenever she’d get home from work, she’d hate the silence of it, so she’d kept herself busy by looking into Vale again, and after weeks of Internet research and long-distance phone calls she’d managed to speak to someone at East Sussex County Council in England, who pulled a death certificate for her.