‘Speak up,’ Breslin says. ‘The camera needs to hear this.’

Rory manages a little more volume, but he’s still having trouble looking at us. ‘Well. Aislinn cancelled a date at the last minute, a couple of weeks ago. She never said why; just that something had come up. And it was pretty complicated trying to schedule our other dates, as well – I’d suggest a day and it wouldn’t work for her, or it would at first and then there was a problem – and sometimes she doesn’t answer her phone . . . I don’t know whether it’s some mind-game – that really, really doesn’t seem like something Aislinn would do, but obviously I don’t know her that well yet – or whether there’s something in her life that she’s not ready to tell me about, like a parent with dementia or alcoholism who sometimes needs looking after at short notice?’ No mention of two-timing, although the possibility has to have occurred to him. Maybe he’s just dodging the slagging from Breslin, but it’s an interesting one to leave out. ‘So I thought this was probably more of the same. Whatever that was.’

‘And you standing there with your lovely Tesco irises,’ Breslin says, almost keeping back a smirk. ‘All ready for action.’ Rory’s head goes down farther.

I say, nice and sympathetic, ‘Were you worried? That something had happened to Aislinn?’

Rory turns towards me gratefully. ‘Yes. I was, a bit. That’s why I asked, when you came in, whether this was about her. I was afraid she might have fainted, or slipped in the shower, or she might be too sick even to pick up her phone – I mean, that might have been the thing she wasn’t ready to tell me about: some illness, epilepsy or . . . But I didn’t know what to do about it. I couldn’t ring 999 and tell them the emergency was that a woman wasn’t answering her door to a guy she’d only known a few weeks – they’d have laughed in my face and told me it sounded like I needed a new girlfriend. Even I knew that was the most likely scenario. But I couldn’t help imagining all the possibilities – I do that, even when it’s not . . . Is Aislinn OK?’

He was out of his comfort zone, and he turned into a useless dithery little spa; or he wants us to think he did. I say, ‘So what did you do?’

‘There was a crack between the curtains, and I could see light inside, so I tried to look through the crack. I was a bit worried that the neighbours would see me and call the police, but I did have texts from Aislinn inviting me over, and I thought maybe the police coming wouldn’t be such a bad idea, because then at least they could check and make sure nothing was up—’