And the title: how much clearer could it be?

There’s a knock on my office door.

‘I’ll call later,’ I said. ‘And good luck, Matt.’ I put the phone down. ‘Come in.’

The door opens. It’s Jenn. She joined a few months back, working in foreign rights.

She fucking annoyed me back then. She was nondescript. Brown, curly hair, a plain face. Nothing special about her at all.

And the bitch turned me down, a week after she started here. I was bored. I am often bored. I decided to use her to alleviate the mood, so I suggested a drink after work.

I have a boyfriend, she said.

Imagine: her turning me down.

It fucking pissed me off.

It’s only a drink, I said. To say welcome.

The damage was done, though. I had asked her out and she had said no. I was enraged. It was humiliating. She should have been grateful; instead I was feeling like a fool.

And who was she to make me feel like that?

I taught her a lesson, though, not that she knows it was me.

‘Hi, Jenn,’ I say. ‘Good weekend? Any news?’

Her face is narrow and her eyes sunken. She’s lost quite a bit of weight in the last three weeks. That’s what worry does to you.

‘No,’ she says.

‘Still no word from him?’

It feels so good to twist the knife. A knife I had put there, with great pleasure.

‘No.’ She shakes her head. ‘He’s disappeared.’

‘People don’t just disappear,’ I say. ‘Something must have happened.’

‘Or he got fed up of me. But he could have said something.’

‘Jenn,’ I say, ‘there’s no way he got fed up with you. You’re amazing.’

She gives the ghost of a smile. ‘Thanks. But I’m not sure that’s true.’

Lovely. A bit of insecurity, accentuated by the fear that he simply left her because she is worthless.

He didn’t, though. He is in the boot of his car, his neck snapped in two, in the corner of a scrapyard. Of course, I told him why he was going to die before I did it.

Because your stupid girlfriend didn’t give me what I want, I said. And I am a man who gets what he wants.

And I do. I always do.

Matt

Matt put the phone down.

‘Who was that?’ DI Wynne said. She and DS Dudek had arrived at his house a few minutes earlier.

‘Guy Sanderson,’ Matt said. ‘He’s Annie’s agent.’

Dudek made a note in his notebook. ‘Might he know if there’d been a problem with a fan?’

‘Maybe,’ Matt said. ‘But he would have mentioned it by now.’

‘You never know,’ Dudek said.

‘We’ll interview him,’ Wynne said. ‘Do you have his contact details?’

‘I’ll write them down. He lives in London. That’s where his office is.’