Wozza grinned. ‘Did you … you know … ?’ He waggled his eyebrows up and down like a manic Marx brother.

‘Did I what?’ I asked.

‘You know … headbutt him? Judo?’

I laughed and nearly choked on my coffee. ‘No. He was relatively undamaged when he left early this morning.’ I leaned back on my own chair and took another sip.

‘Is he still your ex?’ Wozza, the stickybeak.

‘Jeez, you ask the hard questions, my friend.’ To deflect, I reached into my top drawer and pulled out the statement I’d written for the DDI after the encounter with Jack and the medical findings from Doc Caldicott. I gave them to Wozza. He brushed pastry crumbs from his pile of papers and added mine to the stack.

After pulling my phone from my pocket, I tapped the screen on and showed him. ‘I checked my phone and the call I made to a friend from the car park was at 4.16 pm.’

Wozza’s brow furrowed. He began shuffling through a bunch of papers on his desk. ‘I got a printout of Jack Barratt’s phone records yesterday. It’s here somewhere.’

I stood back and let him find it. I wanted no part in the investigation into Jack’s death. I didn’t even know how I felt about it. The juxtaposition of the handsome man at the bar on the first night I met him to the decomposing corpse in the seaweed at the beach last night. A life lost. But that life was also the taker of lives, just like Noah Shepherd had been. Their weapon was one night of their pleasure or power that ruined the lives of their victims. I was not sorry that no other woman would have to experience Jack coming up behind her and grabbing her in a car park like he’d done to me. Whatever else he was to his friends and family, all he would ever be to me was a predator.

‘Found it!’ Wozza pulled a piece of paper from the many others and waved it. He scanned it myopically before remembering his glasses. ‘Okay, here it is,’ he pointed to the last number called. ‘Monday 4.10 pm.’ Wozza scrambled among the papers again until he produced the scrap of paper he’d written Jack Barratt’s call on after we arrested him. He compared the two and looked up at me. ‘He called Lachie Murtog,’ he said.

His brow furrowed. ‘How long would it take you to get from the Devil’s Corner to the car park?’

‘About fifteen minutes to run.’

‘So that means you would have had to leave him around four at the latest to make a call from your car at four sixteen. This friend you rang?’

‘Her name is Pip.’

‘Reckon she’d make a statement? Vouch for you?’

‘I reckon she would,’ I said.