They were in the attic room at the top of the house, where Tasker wrote his books. It was a warm day, but up here the heat was stifling. Gibbs wished nevertheless that Tasker would put on a shirt. The sight of his bare chest was off-putting. Still, he was clean, not obviously stoned, and so far, if you didn’t include his initial refusal to open the door, he had been courteous and articulate.

There was nothing in his writing room apart from books and, immediately beneath the dormer window, a desk with a hard right angle of a chair positioned in front of it. No cushion. The remainder of the space was devoted to emptiness that most people would have filled with a couple of chairs, or a large TV that doubled as a PlayStation. On the desk, a computer and a printer stood side by side. There were no lamps, no pictures, no rugs, no plants. Just cork tiles on the floor, white walls with brown patches here and there from water damage, and Tasker’s writing station. Gibbs had seen more homely prison cells.

A glaring neon light, attached to the ceiling, was on. The window was still completely covered with sheets of black paper.

“My father’s gambling wasn’t a day job so much as a night job,” said Tasker, standing in front of a wall of his books in at least seventeen languages. “I can remember him going out to work as Mum put me to bed, and getting back as she gave me breakfast. That was before he left us, when I was eleven.”

Gibbs glanced down at the author biography again. “For . . . ‘an Afro-American jazz singer who was arrested for the abduction and murder of a child in 1983, then released without charge a week later’? Really?”

“Really.” Tasker folded his arms as if expecting to be challenged. “She had nothing to do with the boy’s murder, though Mum and I wished she had. Everything in my novels is true. Even the fiction’s true—truer than the truth, sometimes.”

“I’m not doubting you. I just . . . I’ve never read an ‘About the Author’ like this one.” Before Olivia, Gibbs had never read an “About the Author,” period. Recently, in her company, he had been reading quite a few bits around the edges of books, though not many actual books. Liv tried to force novels on him occasionally, but the titles were usually enough to put him off: Leopards with Pink Umbrellas, The Cartographer’s Biographer . . . Gibbs couldn’t understand why an author would give a book a title that bored people before they’d even opened it. It was daft.

“You were arrested for shoplifting at age thirteen, gave a false name, then escaped from the police station?” he asked Tasker. “You lived for three weeks on your mother’s boss’s boat and he never found out?”