‘She’s a warrior and a contrarian. Her need to quibble and find fault is so strong, she’ll do it with herself if there’s no one else around. If she were seriously considering killing Marion, she’d immediately start arguing with herself: “Who are you to decide if someone lives or dies?”, “What if you’re the troublemaker and Marion’s lovely and harmless?” Kim’s said that to me more than once. It’s what her repulsive brother thinks, what Marion herself thought, and her husband Trevor before he carked it. That’s the Hopwood family folklore: Kim’s the stain on their otherwise perfect family. She’s never done them any harm apart from try to talk about the whole them-abandoning-her thing in an honest way, but they didn’t appreciate her being around to remind them of their own shoddy behaviour.

‘Anyway …’ Kearns uncrossed his legs and recrossed them with the left one on top this time. ‘Kim knows the score, but it’s hard to shake off the fear that the official family lie might be true. Ultimately, she wouldn’t feel confident enough in her membership of the Hopwood family to kill a Hopwood.’

Sam wasn’t sure he followed the logic of this. Kearns had presented it as if it were a self-evident truth and beyond question.

‘I like you, Sergeant. I trust you. You want Billy behind bars, I want my wife back. Let’s work together on it. I’ve already been to the police station to provide a DNA sample as requested, and I know you’re working hard at your end too. Give me a call when you’re ready to set up another meet. In the meantime, I’m counting on you to keep Kim alive and out of prison.’

A meet, without the ‘ing’ on the end? Was this what the cool young people were saying these days? The cool slightly older people too, by the sound of it. Gabriel Kearns looked around Sam’s age.

‘It’s good to hear you have confidence in the … um … investigation, Mr Kearns. I’ll be in touch if there’s anything else I need.’

Asserting himself was Sam’s least favourite activity, but being addressed as if he were Kearns’s right-hand man, receiving his patronising if favourable appraisal, made Sam wonder if there were any circumstances in which he might lose his temper. He was forty-seven years old and so far in his life he never had, not fully. When he saw it happen to people around him, he felt sorry for them and thought a version of ‘How awful to suffer from a condition like that’, as if he’d witnessed an epileptic fit.