Still, I didn’t think there was any point interviewing Reynard the wannabe fox that evening. So I stopped off at Belgravia to brief Nightingale and make multiple back-ups of the USB pen. Since I was there, I also scanned the files and dumped most of them on the Inside Inquiry Office for assessment and entry into HOLMES, including the real names of our American friends. Crew Cut’s name turned out to be Dean Miller, a former reserve Captain in the 29th Infantry Division who had served in Kosovo and Iraq. The 29th was a National Guard unit, but there was no official word on what his day job had been. After leaving the National Guard he was listed as a ‘consultant’ with Alderman Technical Solutions. A sour little note appended by some anonymous security apparatchik complained that just about everybody at ATS was listed as a ‘consultant’. His military record in Iraq was heavily redacted and what wasn’t missing was written in an impenetrable mix of jargon and acronyms – I thought the Met was bad but they were as nothing compared to US Military. It was going to take some serious Google-hours to translate.

Captain Dean Miller’s compadres all had similar backgrounds in the military and law enforcement and were noticeably from the American south and south-west. I wondered if that might be significant, but it was a small sample size. I added ‘hire a civilian analyst’ to my list of things to go into the growing Word document and moved onto the action list for what was still called operation MARIGOLD because no-one had got round to officially deactivating it yet.

I also thought I might as well work my way through my email backlog, which was just as well because an annoyingly unflagged communication from the Border Agency informed me that Jeremy Beaumont-Jones had flown in from the Bahamas two days before his daughter thought he had. Which meant he had no alibi for our suspected Faceless Man incident involving the collapse of his own house.

Which in turn meant that he was going to have to be TIEd all over again. And since he was back on our Tiger list, that action would fall to me and Nightingale.

I stuck it on our long list of urgent actions before heading back to the Folly and the next morning I got in bright and early to prepare for the interview.

So far, all the earlier interviews with Reynard had gone along the traditional lines of us saying he’d done it and him saying he hadn’t – in continuous variations. This is not an uncommon type of interview, and so over the years police have come up with a number of techniques for breaking the impasse. Some of which are still even legal. One of the techniques not outlawed by human rights legislation is the horrid surprise. So I printed up some crime scene images and took them into the interview room with me.