‘So we now have a second killing which exactly matches the first. How did they know?’

‘Coincidence.’

‘How many times did you accept a coincidence like that in your courtroom?’

‘There are a million ways I can think of. He could have told someone. He could’ve bragged about it in prison for a start. Seems to me you should be checking anyone he might’ve been in contact with there.’

‘We’ve done that, and it turns out Klaasen can’t have told anyone because he was beaten to a pulp the very day he arrived in prison. Brain damage. Very bad brain damage. Vegetable-type brain damage.’

‘What a terrible shame.’

Deadpan.

It’s like he already knew.

I’d long wondered about the sudden appearance of the heroin addict witness at just the moment we needed him. It had bugged me so much that a couple of weeks after Klaasen had been convicted I was passing by the building where Lucie had been found and on a whim I went to the heroin addict’s flat, only to find a family of Sudanese immigrants who had no idea what I was talking about, blank faces staring at me.

But now I’m wondering could Muller have had something to do with it? A grieving father making sure the man he thought responsible was put away? It seems like a stretch, and yet … Could it be? And if so, if he had that kind of power and reach, arranging Klaasen’s beating wouldn’t have been too difficult.

He is staring at me. I get the sense he’s almost willing me to accuse him of it, daring me to. Or am I misreading him?

Somewhere in the house a phone rings, an old-fashioned mechanical chime, and something streaks across the lawn behind Judge Muller. For a second I think it’s Kush, but I can feel him resting his chin on my foot.

‘Something up, inspector?’

I suddenly get the feeling he knows everything, knows that I know that he arranged Klaasen’s beating. The room starts closing in, paranoid thoughts kicking off, the voices coming to life. I need to get out of here. I need to move now. But before I can Kush raises his head and lets out a long, spine-tingling howl, like a wolf standing on a ridge in front of a rising moon. I listen to it as it tails away, and realize the panic is subsiding now too. Kush rests his head back down on my foot.

A moment of weird reality – did that just happen? Muller is giving no indication anything out of the ordinary took place. The clock ticks like it always has, like it always will.

Was that just in my head? Did I imagine it?

I blink and carry on. Because really, what else can you do?

‘I’m still not clear on –’