“No. I mean, not really. You know, you’ll see one or two of them down the Strip, in the takeaway or waiting for a minicab, but I never took much notice. I mean, anything you need around the Strip you have to get from them. They’ve got it all sewn up. Except the chippie, and that’s run by the Chinks. But they don’t live around here.”

Not a racist but . . . Annie thought. The number of times she’d heard that. “I understand you got probation for throwing a brick through a halal butcher’s window,” she said.

“I was pissed, wasn’t I?”

“But why that particular window?”

“Dunno. It was just there.”

“When did this incident with Mimosa and the taxi occur?”

“Week before last. Wednesday or Thursday.”

About a week before she disappeared, Annie calculated. “And the next time you saw Mimsy was on the Sunday or Monday after that?”

“That’s right.”

“How did she seem? Was she upset, worried or anything? Was there anything different about her?”

“No. Same as usual.”

“Any marks on her? Anything like that?”

“No. She just got pissed off when I mentioned I’d seen her with the Paki, that’s all. And, yeah, she was wearing some new trainers, fancy Nikes. I asked her where she’d got the money for them, and she told me she’d saved up.”

“Did you believe her?”

“No reason not to.”

“Did she have a part-time job? A summer job?”

“No.”

“Did Lenny or Sinead give her any pocket money?”

“Shouldn’t think so.”

“Where do you think she got the money for new trainers?”

Albert shrugged. “Dunno. She’d saved it out of the bits and pieces she earned helping out me and Paul? But it must have taken her a long time. He doesn’t pay either of us much. Bit of a skinflint, is Paul. Maybe some bloke gave it to her. You haven’t told me. Did they do it? Do you think it was the Pakis?”

“We don’t know who it was yet, Albert, so don’t take it into your head to do anything stupid.”

“Are you calling me stupid?”

“No, I’m not. I’m just telling you not to do anything foolish. Leave it to us to find out what happened.”

“Right. As if you lot would ever do anything if it was Pakis. You’d be too scared of being called racists.”

“Albert, no matter what you think, we’re out to catch a murderer here, and we’ll use whatever it takes to do that, whoever the murderer turns out to be. You have my word on that.”