I nod obligingly. ‘Well, it doesn’t get much more down and dirty than Slotz.’

‘Yessir, Vic is quite a character.’

‘He’s the boss.’

The attorney works up the courage to step closer. ‘Here, I’m the boss!’

This mood swing is driven home with a backhanded slap across my face. I roll my head with the blow, but honestly I needn’t have bothered.

I spit on the floor; no blood, just spit. ‘What do you want from me, Faber? How come I’m not dead?’

‘You’re not dead, Dan, because I need to know what you know,’ says Faber, jiggling his glasses for some reason. Maybe it’s supposed to signify that these spectacles can see into my soul.

‘About what? These drugs that you can’t get?’

‘Keep going, doorman.’

‘Goran used to get your drugs. You two had some kind of scam going.’

‘And we have a winner. Give that prick a cigar.’

I feel utterly screwed. Somehow, up to this point I had managed to nurture a spark of optimism. I’ve been in worse scrapes, that sort of thing. But now, with Goran’s eyes filming and Deacon strapped to the gurney, I am suddenly devastated. The steel and concrete are too real, and the walls are closing in.

‘I don’t know anything, Faber. I’m only here because of the girl.’

Faber teases his Styrofoam hair with greasy fingers. ‘What girl?’

‘Take your pick. You got one dead, one more or less dead and one on the gurney.’

‘What? The stripper? That’s why you put the cops on to me?’

‘She was murdered. And it’s hostess.’

‘You think I killed her?’

‘I know you killed her, arsehole.’

Faber paces the kitchen, counting off points on his fingers. ‘So you tip Deacon about my fight with Connie. I freak because of this deal we have tonight. Deacon gets suspicious and Goran makes an on-the-spot decision to whack her, which doesn’t work out. Then Deacon’s whacking also falls a little short. So Goran calls me to come get her.’

Faber is filling in a lot of blanks here. Obviously at this point he doesn’t care what I know, which is never good. Being filled in is okay when you’re a kid and you need basic information about numbers and poisonous foods and such, but in my world knowledge gets a person dead quicker than anthrax.

‘I had a shootout with your boys right outside the door,’ I point out to the pointer. ‘The cops are going to find us soon.’

Faber is delighted by this observation, presumably because it’s way off base.