As I clicked on the pen, Mills looked down at himself, at the knife reaching out of his stomach like an arm. Keeping it in was helping to stem the blood flow.

‘Okay,’ he said, ‘let’s start at the beginning. Write this all down, just the way I say it.’ He pointed at the notebook, the chill air fanning its pages. ‘July 1985. Write that.’

I did as he asked.

‘You know anything about Vale before he came to the UK?’

‘Not much.’

‘Well, he killed two people out in LA. He told me all about it once. By then, I’d got myself in too deep with him, accepted too much money, had blood on my hands, so all I could really do was sit there and listen. He wanted to talk to someone about it – confess, I suppose – and I’d gone beyond the point where I could say no.’

‘What do you mean, blood on your hands?’

‘What do you think I mean?’

Black Gale.

‘Did you kill them all or did he?’

‘Just write down what I’m saying,’ he said, waving the gun at me. He couldn’t even look at me now. ‘Like I just told you, he killed two people out in LA.’

‘Who were the victims?’

‘One of them was called Pablo something or other. He was an illegal immigrant from Mexico who lived in the same neighbourhood as Vale, and who Vale used to smoke pot with sometimes. Anyway, this Pablo kid, he tells Vale about this guy he knows who sells extra-strong weed out of a motel room somewhere – I think Vale said it was in West Hollywood. So Vale, playing it safe and not wanting to take his mum’s car to a drug deal, goes to see this guy he used to work for part-time: this old man, Caraca, thinks Vale’s being nice, coming back to say hello and see how he’s doing, but what Vale’s really up to there is stealing a key to the place, so he can come back later and borrow a car without the manager ever knowing. Which is exactly what he does, and then he takes Pablo with him to this motel to score some of this magical pot that they can’t get in their part of the city.’

Mills adjusted himself against the tree, grimaced.

‘Donald Klein,’ he said. ‘That’s the name of the dealer. The other victim. But he used the name Gabriel Wilzon to rent the room.’

I wrote the name down and watched as Mills glanced beyond me, deeper into the forest, in the same direction he’d looked before.