So we started with Robert Huisman, Lucie’s on/off boyfriend and rising star in the local heroin scene. At one point we found evidence she may actually have been involved, playing bagman, or bagwoman, for him on occasion. Needless to say that never made it into the trial documents. It didn’t take us long to establish that given the height and build the hoodied man could easily have been Huisman.

Only Huisman himself seemed to have skipped town, and he proved hard to find, further upping him on our list of People We’d Very Much Like To Talk To. In the end it took us two days to track him down and by the time we had him in custody we were sure we’d have the case wrapped up in a matter of hours.

Which is when Huisman kicked back in his chair and slapped down his alibi with a smirk on his greasy low-browed face.

He claimed he’d been spending a few days with a mate of his down in the countryside just north of Maastricht. Now I’m not saying that inspectors have a monopoly on sniffing out bullshit, but over the years your nose gets pretty attuned to it. And his alibi was filling both our noses with that pungent, freshly laid scent that often permeates suspect interviews. But process dictates, so we followed up, driving all the way down there and locating the friend in question.

Which is where things got tricky.

The friend, a vermin-like creature called Jan Akkerman, swore Huisman had been with him the whole time. We applied pressure, telling him about things such as Obstruction of Justice and Perjury and Accessory to Murder, but Akkerman didn’t budge, wouldn’t change his statement, and sat there like a self-satisfied Buddha grinning down on our folly from the fucking Bodhi tree itself.

Because, he’d said, he could prove it.

He unearthed a video, complete with time stamp, which was subsequently checked and verified. On it, and at almost the exact same time that Lucie was bowing her head into a pool of her own blood, another woman was bowing her head, only this time the destination was Huisman’s dick. As Lucie Muller slipped out of this world her boyfriend was getting sucked off by one of two young women 200 miles from the crime scene. Turned out both men pulled a scam several times a year where they held auditions for women to ‘star’ in their latest porn films. They claimed to own an online portal for which the lucky candidates would make videos and receive a share of any profits. Of course, to get the job all candidates would have to get past the interview stage. The men saw to it that the interviews were rigorous, interactive and in-depth, filmed by one whilst the other took a more hands-on role in the process.