At an empty desk, Dufour and Luis shook hands with him, as if he’d only just walked in, and sat down. He didn’t like either of them, but they were polite. Dufour was a racist, Luis was not. Dan didn’t ask himself how he knew; he knew, the same way he knew in deceptively polite old England, where these days open hostility was mostly reserved for Muslims. Black had been upgraded recently, now they had found more foreign foreigners to fear, with accents and religion. Karen sat at Dan’s side with a notepad. She put on a pair of wire-framed reading glasses.

‘OK,’ said Dufour, looking down at a file. Then he said something else.

‘He says: he’s sorry to keep you waiting. They were waiting for me,’ Karen smiled.

‘Yeah, it’s OK,’ said Dan. ‘But I don’t know why I’m here.’

Karen translated this but Dufour looked blank. The other one, Luis, took out a pad and a pencil, and rested the pad on his knee. He held his pencil clumsily. It was not reassuring. Dufour rattled out sentence after sentence, in French that might as well have been Urdu, and Dan, looking at Karen, waiting for her to translate, saw her expression change.

‘What is it?’ he said.

She turned to him. She was completely different. Not used to doing this job, she couldn’t cover her reactions. Dan hadn’t realised how much he was counting on her. He smiled, trying to re-establish their tiny bond. He thought of Germany, a country which, in his mind, was a haven of sensible, liberal thought, and hoped with sudden panic that Karen Koch would deliver on his stereotype. He remembered neo-Nazi rallies he had seen, and put them from his mind.

‘Detective Dufour says: your wife said you weren’t in bed with her the night Mr Adamson died,’ she said.

Dan was stunned. He wasn’t sure he’d heard her right.

‘What?’

‘Quoi?’ said Karen to Dufour.

Dan felt a jolt of adrenaline. He concentrated on not looking tense. They mustn’t think they were on to something. They weren’t on to anything. There had been a mistake. Griff would be working on getting him out, even as he sat there his father-in-law was probably bawling someone out. He thought of Griff’s stature, and his money, and held on to the thought. He had connections, he wasn’t free-falling, they couldn’t hurt him.

‘Detective Dufour says: how long were you out?’ said Karen.

‘I wasn’t out. I was in bed, all night.’