He took a sip of the coffee. It tasted awful, bitter and acrid. A train rumbled underneath them and the old single-glazed windows rattled in their peeling frames. Must be the Victoria Line where the tunnels are less deep.

‘Was there a reporter?’ Priest asked. ‘Someone else asking about Simeon.’

Mims raised an eyebrow. ‘The blonde girl?’ Priest nodded. ‘Isn’t she a charmer.’

‘She give you any trouble?’

Mims hesitated. ‘No. She came to the gym a couple of times, caught me outside. At first she tried to say she was a friend of Simeon’s but I knew that was bullshit. Then she said she was trying to find out the truth about Alexia. I told her to fuck off.’

‘Did she touch you?’

‘Touch me?’ Mims looked perplexed. ‘I pushed past her at one point. Why? Do you know her?’

Priest ignored the question and changed the subject. ‘Do you know who put Simeon up to all of this?’ Find him, find Simeon’s killer, perhaps. She must know that, but she hasn’t volunteered the information.

‘I don’t know,’ she sighed. ‘I wish I did.’

‘You had a look at Simeon’s phone, though?’

‘Yes,’ she agreed, and with a visible flush of guilt. ‘There were text messages between Simeon and someone else.’

‘Someone calling themselves USER3412.’

‘Yes. But that doesn’t mean anything to me. I know we were only together for a year but I knew all those details about Simeon.’ She tapped her head. ‘Photographic memory. I know all his pin numbers, passwords, secret names and security answers. He couldn’t hide anything from me, poor bastard. The number three, four, one, two is meaningless, in any order.’

‘How did he refer to the person who started this? Did he have a pet name or something? He must have mentioned it.’

Mims sighed. ‘I know that he was in deep. We argued about it a lot. I got fed up with the constant internal conflict he was having about it. He couldn’t work out which side he was on. But I don’t know anything about who the instigator is. I think he thought he was protecting me, in some way. Shielding me from the flak. I guess he didn’t know me as well as I knew him.’

‘Such is the ineptitude of men generally,’ said Priest.

‘To which you seem an exception.’ She looked at him with tired eyes, her arm draped over the back of the sofa.

‘No,’ said Priest after a beat. ‘I’m afraid I’m even more flawed than the vast majority of the species.’

*