“I’m on your side, Ms. Falkner,” he said. “You may not think so, but I am.”

“I wasn’t thinking about it.”

“It’s just that you make it difficult for someone to be on your side.”

“You’re a policeman,” I said. “You’re not meant to be on anybody’s side. You’re meant to investigate and find out the truth.”

He looked dubiously at my workbench, then leaned back on it, half sitting. “I’m not really here,” he said. He consulted his watch. “I finished work half an hour ago. I’m on my way home.”

“Do you want a cup of tea?” I said. “Or a drink?”

“My wife’s waiting at home for me,” he said, “with a drink. Cold white wine, probably.”

“Sounds nice,” I said. “But if you’re not on duty . . .”

“I just wanted to tip you off that things might get a bit messy.”

“Why do you want to tip me off?” I said. “And why should they get messy?”

“Obviously it’s all rubbish. You—Well, it sounds stupid even to say the words, but I’m going to anyway. You obviously couldn’t have been involved with the death of your husband, could you?”

I’d been carrying on intermittently with my piece of sandpaper, but now I stopped and stood up. “Are you waiting for me to say no?” I said.

“You’ve been going around making yourself look suspicious but it still doesn’t work.”

“It doesn’t work because it isn’t true,” I said.

“We don’t work on truth. We work on evidence. Even so. The death of your husband was recorded as an accident. You were the one who was going around screaming that it wasn’t. I’ve tried to think about it as a double bluff, or a triple bluff, but I can’t make it work. And then not only did you claim you didn’t know about your husband’s infidelity, you actually made a bloody . . . Well, you kept claiming it was all a mistake, that they weren’t even having an affair. Even when you found evidence that they were.”

“But the evidence doesn’t work.”

“Evidence is always messy.”

“Not messy,” I said. “Impossible.”

He was rocking himself back and forth on the bench. “You really didn’t know about the affair?” he said. “I mean before your husband’s death.”

“I don’t believe he was having an affair.”

“Did you have an argument on the day of your husband’s death?”

“No.”

Ramsay stood up and walked across the room to look out of the window. “Do you need planning permission for a shed like this?” he asked.

“No,” I said.

“Interesting,” he said.

“Is that relevant?”