‘You can do that from the station,’ she said.

‘But I’ve got a phone here.’

She scowled at me but in a way that suggested she was enjoying every minute of this. ‘Did you really kill her because she gave you a bad review?’ she asked.

‘I didn’t kill anyone!’ I tried to appeal to her human side. ‘Look, if you’re annoyed with me because of what happened the last time we met, that really wasn’t my fault. I mean, I didn’t do it on purpose—’

‘It’ll go easier for you if you come clean,’ she interrupted.

She had no human side. For the next few minutes, she said nothing, sitting at my table like some sort of malevolent Buddha, unmoving and imperious, letting me sweat it out as I wondered what was going to happen next.

Then Mills returned. Cara got up and let him in – she wouldn’t even allow me to answer my own door phone and I marvelled at the way that, when the police take control of you, they assume almost total power. Mills was carrying a pile of oversized plastic bags, which he placed on the table. ‘You’re going to have to get changed,’ he said.

‘What?’ I was wearing a T-shirt and the same jeans I’d had on the night before. ‘Why?’

‘We need your clothes.’ He searched in the pile and pulled out a pale blue onesie with a zip up the front. It was made of a very thin fabric, like paper.

‘I’m not putting that on!’ I protested.

‘Yes, you are,’ Mills assured me.

‘I’ll leave you two men together,’ Cara said and left the room with a half-concealed smirk. She didn’t go far, though. I could still feel her presence out in the hallway. She was probably watching through the crack in the door.

Mills made me strip off and put on the jumpsuit. He put plastic bags over my hands. ‘Where’s your bedroom?’ he asked.

We went up together and he made me show him the clothes I’d worn the night before. All of these went into the plastic bags, which he carefully labelled and sealed. After what had happened the last time we met, he wasn’t going to make any mistakes. Finally, the three of us left together. I was feeling ridiculous in the outfit they’d given me. It rustled as I walked. But from the research I’d been doing half my life, and, indeed, from what Hawthorne had told me when I was writing Injustice, I knew they weren’t doing all this just to humiliate me. They were keeping the evidence clean, preventing any fibres transferring themselves from me to their police car and vice versa. My humiliation was just an enjoyable extra.

Their car was parked outside – not a police car but a tatty Ford Escort. I asked them where we were going, but of course they didn’t tell me, and once again I felt the whisper of terror that comes from having handed over all choice, all control to representatives of the state. I was a parcel in their hands and they could deliver me where they liked.