Quill straightened up and nodded to him. ‘Thanks for that. I’ll leave you to it; I don’t want to get in the way of your dinner.’

*   *   *

Tunstall was in a workhouse, walking on an enormous wheel that was slowly grinding a millstone. He wore a long coat made of weights. Quill wondered aloud if this was something he was doing to himself.

‘No,’ the man sighed, ‘this is very much something being done to me by others.’

‘What got you killed?’

So Quill was told about a working life spent making some extra cash on the side, necessary to keep a home for his wife and child. The man had, as Quill suspected, been the one who searched Spatley’s office. ‘Not very professionally, I should think, but pretty thoroughly.’ Quill was amazed, distantly, by the idea that Tunstall might still take pride in the quality of such a job. Tunstall had been told to stop the car, when he’d been driving Spatley, in a specific place at a specific time. ‘We’d already worked out where security might send us if a particular road got blocked up. I didn’t know what was going to happen. I was so shocked after … well, I didn’t even know if that had been what the bloke I was working for had planned…’

Quill asked for a description, and recognized the man who’d met Mary Arthur at the Soviet bar.

‘So I said what I’d seen happen, straight off. I suppose part of me thought I might get off because it was all so mad, though I was being well paid to take any fall. We was sent a lot of money in a way so my wife could get hold of it. We needed that money. You don’t know how hard it is; they expect you to live in town … But then you lot turn up, saying you actually believe me, and you get me off. And I go home and … and it’s all shit. I couldn’t keep Spatley’s face out of my head, how scared he was when he was killed. I did like him, all right? But I’m holding on for my family, it’s all I ever did. Until you lot want to interview me again, and I start thinking I’d feel better if I told you everything. And then … then the Ripper came for me.’

‘You want to come clean about everything now, then?’

Tunstall seemed to understand what Quill was talking about. ‘I did something else on orders. When he was lying there dead in the back seat … I reached into his jacket pocket, and my hands were shaking, I tell you. I took out this piece of paper I’d been told was there, and I … I ate it. I was told that was the only way to get rid of it without tipping anyone off that anything had been there. Burn it and there’d be, you know, the smell. They didn’t even want to risk me crumpling it up and taking it with me. I can still taste it.’ Quill could see the tears welling up in the man’s eyes. ‘I mean, my mouth’s still full of it. It’s all I can taste.’