‘So you have a confession? Is that what you’re telling us?’

Superintendent Roger Burton didn’t look like a man on the cusp of an investigative win. He looked like someone who hadn’t been sleeping, and who was running largely on coffee and cortisol. Burton was known for his fastidious diet, as well as his daily pilgrimages to the squash court, and ordinarily whenever Fleet was in the superintendent’s presence, he felt like a walking NHS warning poster. But today Burton’s cheeks appeared unusually gaunt, his skin worryingly grey. The man was in his fifties, so perhaps it was the years of hypertension catching up with him. Or perhaps it was the pressure of the case, together with his evident discomfort at being only the third-most important person in the room.

‘We have an apology,’ Fleet answered. ‘I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a confession. And the reality is, we still don’t know what exactly Lance Wheeler thought he was apologising for.’

‘But that seems obvious. Doesn’t it?’

Both Fleet and Burton turned to face Manish Apte, the county’s police and crime commissioner, who was sitting at the head of the conference table. They were in a room on the top floor of the police station, seated at one end of a table that had enough chairs around it for twenty-five. Fleet was to the PCC’s right. Burton and a man named Webb – who was here, in his words, representing the Home Office – were to Apte’s left. Nominally Apte was chairing the meeting, and Webb had barely spoken. But from the way both Apte and Burton repeatedly glanced Webb’s way, it seemed perfectly obvious that he was really the man in charge.

‘I mean, given the timing,’ Apte continued, ‘and the fact that Wheeler was due to be interviewed first thing in the morning. If he didn’t kill the Draper boy, what else would have prompted Wheeler to take his own life? Why else make an apology?’

And that, indeed, was the question Fleet had been wrestling with himself. On the laptop in Lance’s apartment, the words I’m sorry had been left on the screen – seemingly Lance’s last act before stringing himself up by his belt in his kitchen. As Apte had said, the explanation seemed obvious. But Fleet had been doing his job long enough to know the perils of taking things at face value.