‘That’s what I want to do,’ he said, interrupting the detective. His voice reverberated around them, but the two detectives didn’t even flinch. ‘You’re just not asking the right questions. You should be looking into all those deaths and seeing the connection between them all. Instead, you keep messing around with diversions. Let me talk and I’ll tell you what you need to know.’

There was a pause. A glance between the two detectives. The solicitor sitting next to him seemed to shift away from him slightly, as if distance would help him. ‘Why don’t you ask about all the other victims? How I convinced them to believe a story and then die.’

He could see the anger return to DI Hicks’s eyes. He needed that.

He needed his judgement to be clouded.

He was desperate.

‘We’ve gone over some of the names you’ve given us,’ DS Lee said, a pen in her hand, scoring down a list on one of the files in front of her. ‘They were found dead in a few different locations, but concentrated in the north-west region mostly. Different ages, split between genders. You’ve been concentrating on women more recently, I see. Your first named victim was male. The male is the only one classed as an unsolved murder. The rest are all apparent suicides. Over the past eleven months, all of them were found dead. That was all that linked them together until you told us you killed them. Why now?’

‘Because you found me.’

‘How did we find you?’

He paused, wishing he’d accepted a drink of water now. His mouth had been going dry, but the last question had finished the job. ‘You’d have to ask someone else. I don’t know. Luck?’

‘Perhaps it is just luck,’ DS Lee said, looking back at her notes and not giving anything away. ‘Shall we talk about your fourth victim – Melissa Carmichael – what can you tell me about her?’

‘What do you want to know?’

‘Everything,’ DS Lee replied, her face inscrutable. ‘Start from when you chose her as a victim. How did you meet her?’

He didn’t like the way she had taken charge of the interview, leaving DI Hicks to sit in silence. He had found it easier to deal with the barely constrained anger of the man. The blankness of DS Lee’s features troubled him.

‘She told lies. So I told her to go to a certain place. Perform certain tasks. She didn’t question me. She did as she was told and she became my fourth victim because of it.’

‘What did you ask her to do?’

He didn’t answer, staring back at her instead. Not sure what she was trying to achieve. She didn’t strike him as someone who could be intimidated.

He didn’t want to answer.

That was the truth.