‘No!’ he screams and lunges at me. I sidestep, only my foot lands on something and shoots out from under me. He takes advantage of my loss of balance, coming at me hard, the impact knocking me down. Vermeer reacts fast, grabbing him from behind in a chokehold. He reverses direction, slamming her back into the far wall and then elbows her in the stomach. She gasps and loosens her grip, and he slips out of her grasp and turns to her. I’m scrambling up from the floor as he throws the first punch right at her face. But Vermeer ducks, his fist hits the concrete with a sickening crunch, and she’s already grabbed his wrist and is twisting it down behind his back. It’s swift and clinical. She has him cuffed and on his knees in seconds.

‘You all right?’ I ask.

She shrugs, like it was nothing. ‘More worried about you.’

‘Yeah, just …’ I look round to see what I’d slipped on. It’s a clipboard, the type that hang on the ends of beds in hospitals. I pick it up just as Vermeer’s manoeuvring Huisman to the door.

‘Let’s get this fucker booked in,’ she’s saying just as my heart detonates hard in my chest. The room starts to spiral very, very slowly.

‘Oh shit …’ It can’t be true.

Vermeer stops. ‘What?’

I hand her the clipboard over a vast distance.

‘What am I looking at?’

I point to the date of admission.

It’s two full days before Marianne Kleine was killed.

It takes less than ten minutes to confirm that Huisman checked in when the clipboard said he did, and hasn’t left the property since. In fact, he’d not even left the room, and the CCTV footage the woman in charge had shown me, since Vermeer had decided not to be seen by her again, confirmed that. Huisman is categorically off the hook.

I walk out of there and feel like the world’s dropping away from me. All this work to get to Huisman, only to find he can’t have killed Marianne Kleine. Which in turn means he most likely wasn’t Lucie Muller’s killer either. I feel a deep cold creeping through me. Because we’ve now got two murders, two young women whose lives were taken from them, and no idea of who or why.

Vermeer lets me drive, and we don’t talk. Because what is there to say?

A few minutes out from the station Vermeer finally speaks.

‘You covered yourself, right?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘I mean, they’re not going to be able to trace that call to you, are they?’