‘Jesus, what a mess. What a fucking mess.’ He looked down at me again. ‘It was when you mentioned Alex Bayley that I knew there was no point carrying on. That it was all over.’

‘Tell me,’ I said. ‘All of it.’

He rubbed his face in both hands, exhaled heavily and looked out at the view for a moment, at the dark hills in the distance, before turning his attention back to me.

‘It all started a few weeks ago,’ he said.

‘Go on.’

He hesitated, then ploughed on.

‘I was out running, training for that half-marathon I was going to do. It was late and I was on those quiet little back roads out by the golf course and I came up behind a car stopped at a junction, just sitting there, lights on, engine running. Just this one car, no one else around. I thought maybe they were lost or something. It was only when I came level with it that I could see the driver was sitting behind the wheel, on his phone, and there was this mountain bike on the road in front of him, all bent out of shape. I looked back at the driver and recognised him.’

I remembered yesterday, Daniel finding himself alone in the villa; Jennifer’s insistence that her boys would never have taken one of the cars out.

‘It was Jake, wasn’t it?’

‘In Jennifer’s car. I’m about to knock on his window but then the next thing I know he’s slammed the car into gear and he’s off, like a bat out of hell. So it’s just me and this twisted-up bike, but then I see the cyclist. The impact had thrown him into the hedge on the far side of the road. I was sort of in shock, I think. I checked on the lad and he still had a pulse but he was in a bad way; he wasn’t wearing a helmet and his face was covered in blood. I take my phone out to call an ambulance but as I’m dialling, it starts ringing in my hand. It’s Jen, in floods of tears, begging me not to say what I just saw, not to give her car reg, to leave Jake out of it. I didn’t know what the fuck to do, she was so upset.’

I force myself to breathe.

‘So you agreed.’

‘I didn’t know what to do! I wanted to do the right thing and Jennifer was distraught. I wanted to help her, so I rang off and called 999 and said I’d just found this lad and his bike, and that was it.’

‘You didn’t mention the car, or the driver.’

He shook his head, the wind whipping at his hair. ‘Jen was in such a state, I thought it was the right thing to do.’

‘You lied to the police?’

‘I wish to God I hadn’t now.’