‘Why not?’

‘’Cause she liked me driving her, didn’t she?’ said Kolovas-Jones, as though Strike was being obtuse. ‘I used to help her out with the paps and stuff, do a bit of bodyguard stuff to get her in and out of places.’

By the merest flicker of his facial muscles, Wilson managed to convey what he thought of the suggestion that Kolovas-Jones was bodyguard material.

‘Couldn’t you have swapped with another driver, and driven her instead of Macc?’

‘I coulda, but I didn’t want to,’ Kolovas-Jones confessed. ‘I’m a big Deeby fan. Wanted to meet him. That’s what Lula was pissed off about. Anyway,’ he hurried on, ‘I took her to her mum’s, and waited, and then, this is the bit I wanted to tell you about, right?

‘She come out of her mother’s place and she was strange. Not like I’d ever seen her, right? Quiet, really quiet. Like she was in shock or something. Then she asked me for a pen, and she started scribbling something on a bit of blue paper. Wasn’t talking to me. Wasn’t saying anything. Just writing.

‘So, I drove her to Vashti, ’cause she was supposedta be meeting her friend there for lunch, right—’

‘What’s Vashti? What friend?’

‘Vashti – it’s this shop – boutique, they call it. There’s a café in it. Trendy place. And the friend was…’ Kolovas-Jones clicked his fingers repeatedly, frowning. ‘She was that friend she’d made when she was in hospital for her mental problems. What was her fucking name? I used to drive the two of them around. Christ… Ruby? Roxy? Raquelle? Something like that. She was living at the St Elmo hostel in Hammersmith. She was homeless.

‘Anyway, Lula goes into the shop, right, and she’d told me on the way to her mother’s she was gonna have lunch there, right, but she’s only in there a quarter of an hour or something, then she comes out alone and tells me to drive her home. So that was a bit fucking strange, right? And Raquelle, or whatever her name is – it’ll come back to me – wasn’t with her. We usedta give Raquelle a lift home normally, when they’d been out together. And the blue piece of paper was gone. And Lula never said a word to me all the way back home.’

‘Did you mention this blue paper to the police?’

‘Yeah. They didn’t think it was worth shit,’ said Kolovas-Jones. ‘Said it was probably a shopping list.’

‘Can you remember what it looked like?’

‘It was just blue. Like airmail paper.’

He looked down at his watch.

‘I gotta go in ten.’

‘So that was the last time you ever saw Lula?’

‘Yeah, it was.’

He picked at the corner of a fingernail.

‘What was your first thought, when you heard she was dead?’

‘I dunno,’ said Kolovas-Jones, chewing at the hangnail he had been picking. ‘I was fucking shocked. You don’t expect that, do you? Not when you’ve just seen someone hours before. The press were all saying it was Duffield, because they’d had a row in that nightclub and stuff. I thought it might’ve been him, to tell you the truth. Bastard.’