Ramsay started to say something, then stopped and gestured to me to go on. As I meandered through the story, I felt as if I was talking about the misadventures of someone I didn’t really know—a distant cousin or a friend of a friend—whom I didn’t much care for and certainly didn’t understand. When I got on to the subject of Milena dying in the car accident with Greg and how I’d read her emails and how she had also had an affair with Frances’s husband, David, Ramsay’s head sank slowly into his hands. I then told him that Frances had confided in me that she, too, had had an affair.

“I thought, or wondered, if the man she had had her affair with was Greg,” I added.

“What?” He raised his head and stared at me; there was a glazed expression in his eyes.

“You see, she said this man, I never got to know his name, had also had a fling with Milena, then turned to her. It doesn’t sound like the Greg I knew, but by that stage I was so confused I didn’t know what to think about anything.”

“I know the feeling,” he growled.

The one detail I deliberately withheld was my sexual relationship, such as it was, with Johnny. I don’t think it was out of any concern that it would make me look bad. It was far too late for that. I just felt it wasn’t an important detail and that at least I could spare Johnny the attention it might bring him.

Anyway, there was hardly a shortage of damaging revelations. When I talked about my attempts to find out about the relationship between Milena and Greg, DI Carter interrupted me. “She compiled charts,” he said.

“What?” asked Ramsay, in a weak tone.

“Like they do with school timetables on big pieces of cardboard. It established the whereabouts of her late husband and of the woman.”

“Charts,” said Ramsay, looking at me.

“I had to know,” I said. “I needed to prove to myself, and to the world maybe, that they really did know each other, or that they really didn’t.”

“You’ve been told it’s hard to prove a negative,” said Ramsay. “Kind of a police motto.”

“People keep telling me,” I said. “Not that it’s a police motto, that it’s hard.”

There was a pause. I leaned over the tape machine to see if the little spools were turning.

“Is that all?” asked Ramsay.

“I think so,” I said. “I’m not sure if I told it in the right order. I may have left things out.”

“It’s difficult to know where to start,” said Ramsay. “For example, as someone who was working for Frances Shaw under an assumed name, you are an obvious suspect in her murder. If you had stayed on the scene, forensic examination might have exonerated you.”