Gillard and Claire made sure they were there at the entrance as Harry almost staggered towards them down the long corridor from the visiting suite. He looked ashen.

‘How is he, Harry?’ Gillard asked.

Harry slung them a venomous look and strode past, more faltering steps on the long and painful march from love to loss.

Two custody officers then escorted Zayan Lal straight to a windowless interview room where the detectives were waiting for him with a duty solicitor. He fell like a sack of spuds on the seat opposite. If the objective of the strategy was to soften up their target, it had been more than successful. He was a wreck. His eyes were bloodshot, he looked like he hadn’t slept.

‘How are you, Zayan?’ Gillard asked. All he got in response was a shrug.

‘I see that Harry has been to see you,’ Claire said.

Zayan nodded.

‘I thought you’d appreciate the chance to explain to him your side of the story,’ Gillard said.

‘I bet,’ he replied, rubbing his face wearily.

Gillard then ran through the likely course of events, continued remand in custody and a high-profile trial followed by a conviction that, based on precedents for the murder of a policeman, was likely to be in excess of twenty-five years in a high security jail.

The prisoner was trembling now.

‘Of course if you co-operate fully, and we get a guilty plea, things could go a bit easier,’ Claire said. By design, Gillard excused himself, leaving Claire to continue. She offered him a box of paper tissues, which in itself prompted some barely suppressed sobbing.

‘I did it for him, you understand? His whole life he’d had to hide who he really was. I wanted to free him. It was an act of liberation.’

‘He doesn’t seem to see it that way.’ Claire watched the tape, slowly turning and spooling up the truth.

‘He doesn’t love me any more. It’s all over.’ It was almost as if he didn’t understand how it had come to this.

‘Well, that’s what happens when you kill someone’s mother. It’s not rocket science, Zayan.’

By the next day, Lal was ready to get everything off his chest. All Gillard and Claire Mulholland had to do was to steer the confession away from maudlin self-loathing and back towards the facts. The first details he was ready to give were of the events at Mount Browne’s kitchen on the day that Hodges died.

‘I think it was breakfast on the second morning, just before I was due to go off shift, that I heard your name.’ Lal looked at Gillard. ‘Your order was announced by the West Indian woman. It got me to thinking. So the next evening, before I came in in the minibus, I was rooting around the place I was crashing and I found this radiator cleaner gunk. It had glycol in it, so I thought I’d bring it in with me. I didn’t expect to use it—’