“Your lawyer is mad as hell,” she’d said.

“I pay him to be,” I’d said back.

Frankie couldn’t trust me now, not after my arrest for Claire Bingley’s attack. But maybe seeing an accusation against me turn up false had given her hope. As I’d tried to point out to her on the phone in Cairns, she didn’t have to trust me to help me, and by helping me, even when there was a chance I was guilty, she’d always know she’d done everything she could to stay loyal and true to the old Ted she had once known, the one she liked, her teammate, even if he was dead now. Maybe that’s why she put a folder of papers down before me in the interview room and stepped back into the doorway, physically and emotionally distancing herself once again.

“These are copies of the Crime Stoppers calls about Claire Bingley’s abduction,” Frankie said. “When the AMBER Alert went out, the call center started getting flooded with sightings, so the first few pages are just that. But then after she was found, and it was announced she’d been assaulted, people started ringing in with leads about the culprit. Obviously, they sort of fizzled out after we arrested you.”

I’d weighed the papers in my hands, watched her standing there in the doorway.

“Is anyone on the case right now?” I asked. “Is there anyone I can talk to about current leads?”

“The case is in holding,” she said. She couldn’t look at me. I knew why. “In holding” meant the case had been shelved pending new evidence. As far as the brass was concerned, they knew who had raped Claire Bingley. They just couldn’t prosecute him for it.

I’d glanced briefly at the papers in the taxi on the way to the Lord Chesterton, but Elise’s appearance at the station had got my mind so tangled up, I hadn’t had time for much more. The folder was now in my backpack on the floor beside my stool at the bar. The owner of the pub came by after a while and refilled my glass without asking, and I noticed a young man standing in the doorway of the room.

The hairs on my arms and the back of my neck stood on end. I put the bodily reaction down to nervousness at my speaking commitment, at the strange faces that would soon fill the room, wanting to know every intimate detail of my horrific past year. I smiled at the young man anyway, and he gave a nervous smile back.

“Are you here for the—” I gestured at the empty room behind me “—the thing?”

“Yeah.”

“You’re a bit early,” I said.

“So are you.”