He gestures towards the blinds, the front door. She follows his gaze and spots the camera. It’s been angled further into the room. Is Ajay reassuring her or trying to warn her? Let her know that they’re being filmed? He adjusts his laptop with one hand, positioning it so that the screen is facing towards her. His other hand is on the notebook. She watches as he makes sure it’s turned towards her too. And then she glances down at what Ajay’s written on the page.

Please do the tests – for my sake and yours. He can see and hear everything.

80

Silas

‘I know this is difficult, Silas. Kate was a good friend of yours as well as a colleague. We were all upset by her accident. And the decision to close the super-recogniser unit was not one that I took lightly, as you know.’

Silas looks out of his boss’s window. He’s never heard such tosh.

‘I still think we should call Rob in for questioning,’ Silas says. ‘At least ask him what he was doing on the night of Kate’s crash.’

His boss, Detective Superintendent Ward, is ten years younger than Silas, and the talk in the force is when, not if, he’ll become Detective Chief Superintendent. Silas has always tried to like him, but he’s not making it easy today.

‘You say a Tesla was spotted at the scene of the accident, but we have to look at where this information’s come from,’ he continues. ‘An anonymous local drug dealer who was told by the barman of the Bluebell, now deceased. It’s not exactly gospel, is it?’

Put like that, Silas can see Ward’s point. Except that he hasn’t come clean, told him that the anonymous local drug dealer is Conor, his own son. How could he?

‘And Rob’s not the only person in Britain who drives a Tesla,’ Ward adds.

He’s trying not to make Silas sound stupid. Silas’s lack of a university degree never used to be a problem, but he is finding it increasingly hard these days, and not just because his boss happens to have a first from Oxford. Every new officer who joins the force seems to be a graduate, challenging his own education at the ‘university of life’, as his dad used to call it.

‘But Rob did visit Kate in hospital and is now her partner,’ Silas continues. ‘Don’t you think it’s a coincidence worth investigating if he was there that night?’

‘We don’t know who was there.’

Silas is not going to win this one. He hasn’t even tried to explain a possible connection between the gun used in Cornwall and Gilmour Martin, Rob’s double in Thailand, who has also been seen driving a Tesla. There’s only one thing left to try.

‘I think Rob might have visited here before the accident,’ Silas says.