‘You don’t look like the sort of person who likes to be given advice,’ Muller says, still staring at me intently. ‘But I’m going to give it to you anyway. Sander Klaasen killed my Lucie, no one else, do you get that? No one else but that evil bastard, and it has nothing to do with DH Biotech or this Kleine you think I knew, or anyone else, and, I swear, if you’re going to carry on, then I’ll …’

It costs him, but he manages to cut himself off. He knows threatening a police officer is not a smart move, even if there are no witnesses. I guess he could be worried I’m recording him.

‘Go on.’

‘I think it’s time you left,’ he says, the anger reined in. But it’s still there, underneath, hidden like the disease slowly eating him from the inside out. ‘Go back to your houseboat and drop all this.’

Outside I let Kush off the leash and lean against the car. In a way I can understand Muller’s anger and reluctance to have the case brought up again, and maybe my earlier thoughts were wrong, maybe it’s as simple as him having nothing left except the certainty of knowing his daughter’s killer is in prison paying some kind of price. To entertain the thought that the killer may still be out there would take that certainty away. Grief can be irrational. I’m suddenly not quite sure why I’d come, and yet as I drive away, the house flickering between the trees again, glimpses of a parallel universe, I get the feeling there was something in what he’d said that was important. Only I don’t know what it was.

‘What do you think?’ I ask Kush.

As reward for breaking me out of the rising panic, and I don’t know if that was a coincidence or it was something he did on purpose, I’m letting him ride up in the front seat with me.

He just looks at me, panting, tongue hanging limply from his mouth. He stays silent all the way to Amsterdam.

Back at the station I delve deeper into DH Biotech, Muller’s outburst having the opposite effect on me to that which he’d intended. And yes, he had meddled with the investigation the first time round, and on the drive back I’d come to believe that he’d somehow got to Klaasen in prison, but that’s not going to stop me. He was once a powerful man, but I doubt he retains enough of that to interfere with this investigation. But then again, how does he know I live on a houseboat? Odd, to say the least. I shake it off and turn to the papers in front of me.

‘You Rykel?’

I look up to see a young uniform standing in the doorway. He’s eating a packet of crisps.

‘Me Rykel.’