‘True. But I don’t want him around for this.’

‘For a particular reason, or just your usual megalomania?’ Charlie took a long, deep drag of her cigarette. Knowing there would be no reply, she didn’t wait. ‘Why are you so fixated on this old lady?’ She always vowed not to ask and she always ended up begging.

‘Isn’t it obvious?’ said Simon.

‘No. Like everything else you think is obvious – no, it isn’t.’

‘I’ve told you what was said at the London briefing yesterday. Word for word.’

‘And still I fail to intuit your conclusions, spoilsport that I am. So what’s the real reason you’re not tearing down to Poole to grill this old biddy? Don’t pretend you give a toss about offending James Wing.’

‘I’m not ready yet.’

‘What would have to happen for you to be ready?’ Charlie threw her cigarette end out of the car, squashed it with her shoe, then climbed out and stretched her legs.

Simon followed her lead. He slammed the passenger door shut. ‘I want to be surer of the answer I’ll get before I ask the question,’ he said.

‘Follow that logic and—’

‘Yes. That’s what I’d like. To know, without asking. Just listen in silence to all the shit everyone spouts all day long, and work it out in my head, and know. Only speak when I’m certain. I’m sick as fuck of asking this, that, the other. It’s demeaning.’

And a crucial part of your job.

No point in saying it.

‘I like the sound of this new regime,’ Charlie said instead. She pulled a red lipstick out of her bag and ran it over her lips as they walked up the steps to the front door of the nick. ‘When you’ve given up asking questions, can you start answering them instead? That would be amazing! Let’s practise now. I’ll ask, you answer. What is it about an old woman stupidly thinking a picture on a van is a real person that’s obsessing you so much?’

‘Her son.’ Simon’s eyes were cloudy and distant. ‘He was the one who rang up James Wing and said his mother had made an embarrassing mistake – and we weren’t even told his name! Wing didn’t think it worth mentioning.’

‘You think the son could be Billy?’

‘What? No.’ Simon looked confused, then annoyed, like someone who’d had his concentration broken by the blare of a car alarm. ‘I mean, he might be, but I doubt it. I’d better go.’

He pushed through the double doors into the building. Charlie did the same a few seconds later. He hadn’t bothered to hold them open for her. He never did.

‘Books are important!’ Sam Kombothekra raised his voice to be heard over the lunchtime din in the Brown Cow.