Jamie hesitated, then gave in. ‘I thought maybe I was on something, that maybe someone had dropped something into my pint. That table –’ he pointed – ‘right beside Rupert and this girl just … erupted. All the glasses went flying. This guy that had been standing there was knocked down by it, got cut across his head, and he was screaming. The girl went to help him, squatted down to see what was wrong with him, and Rupert went too. I was thinking maybe some sort of bomb had gone off. And I think the security people started to come over.’

‘And?’

‘She went flying backwards. Like she’d been on one of those springboards stuntmen use. I mean, she shot upwards, I saw her feet off the ground, backwards, and she sort of flew, just a couple of feet, and hit the back wall there, and she stayed there, hanging there, and she was struggling, she was yelling, it was like she was actually fighting with something. She had no idea what was going on, no more than I did.’

‘What was Rupert doing?’

‘He went to try to get her down. But then … he spun round, and blood came out of his mouth. I thought he’d been shot. I ducked down. Really, I did. But then these … wounds … they just started to appear on him, up and down his body, across his neck, and he was staggering about, screaming. And then, then it was like something just burst out of him, like he’d been ripped open. There was this enormous spray of blood, more than you’d think there could be. He fell down. The crowd panicked, I mean, everyone just went apeshit, trying to get outside, running right into the Toffs and the skinheads, and then the police got here, thank Christ, and…’ He trailed off. He was looking at Quill almost desperately. ‘That’s the truth,’ he said. ‘Is that okay?’

*   *   *

‘Not many of the witnesses did tell the truth, actually,’ said Ross, reading the report that had been thrust into her hand by an annoyed-looking member of Jason Forrest’s staff. ‘You can’t really blame them. Our own witness statements tend to greater accuracy in cases like this because we let them know it’s okay to say mad shit. We have statements here taken by the main operation, saying that both a skinhead and a Toff protestor did the killing. Which means, I hope, that Forrester will just regard the statements we’ve harvested, when we share them with him, as equally mad.’

Quill glanced through the big window at a hungover early summer morning. A police line was keeping an enormous scrum of press back from the scene of the crime. Forrest himself was now striding about the room, looking at where the body had lain, with Lofthouse at his side. There was no message this time, they were certain, having examined every inch of wall.