Getting ready singing into corkscrew like teenager w hairbrush. That smell of blood soaks the air again, butcher’s-shop thick. Rory’s imagination is good, but he’s not clairvoyant. He was watching Aislinn on Saturday night.

‘It would have knocked him breathless. He must have felt like the world was tilting, he must have thought he had believed in that daydream so hard that it had burst its way into reality . . . He wouldn’t have known that that’s not the way life works.’ A bitter wrench to one side of Rory’s mouth. ‘He would have been sure that, somehow, Aislinn was wearing that dress and cooking that meal for him. And when he could breathe again, he would have stepped out of the dark and wiped the worst of the rain off his coat, and he would have knocked on her door.’

Nice ending. Rory folds his hands, takes a long breath and looks at me expectantly. He wants to leave it there.

I’m loving this interview. Not just because it’s going well; I’m loving this interview because it’s clean. No ifs and maybes twitching in the corners, gumming up the air, itching inside my clothes. No layers on layers of outside chances and hypotheticals to take into account every time I open my mouth or listen to an answer. Just me and the guy across from me, and what we both know he did. It lies on the table between us, a solid thing with the taut dark shine of a meteorite, for the winner to claim.

I say, ‘And then?’

Rory’s neck twists. When I keep watching him, eyebrows up and inquiring, he says, ‘Well. And obviously Aislinn wasn’t getting ready for him; she was getting ready for me. She hadn’t so much as thought about him in months. So she would have been astonished to see him. Presumably she told him to leave. And that’s when he snapped.’

I keep up the inquiring look. ‘And . . . ?’

Lower, to the table: ‘And hurt her.’ That charge is ebbing out of the room, out of Rory’s voice and his face, leaving him wispy and beige again. His lovely story has burst, just like he described, against the gravel-sharp reality of dead Aislinn. When the silence keeps going, even lower: ‘Killed her.’

‘How would he do it?’

Rory shakes his head.

‘Rory. Help me out here.’

‘Don’t you already know?’

‘I’m asking you a favour,’ I say gently, leaning in to catch his eye. ‘Pretend it’s just a made-up story, OK? Like the ones you told Aislinn? Just finish it for me. Please.’

‘I don’t . . . All I know is he wouldn’t have had a weapon with him. A knife or anything. He would never have been planning to . . . Maybe a, a, a lamp or something, something that was already there . . .’ He runs a trembling hand across his face. ‘I can’t—’