DCI Stoner got out of his unmarked car and DI Ure got out of the back seat. Uniformed officers began emerging from the white van, opening kitbags that contained white suits and blue boots and gloves. They did not seem to be in any kind of hurry.

DCI Stoner and DI Ure walked down to the office. ‘Is there anything you want to tell me?’ he said.

I looked at the officers getting into their white suits.

‘I didn’t do anything,’ I said.

He exchanged a look with DI Ure. He had recovered from the public humiliation of the morning but there was weariness about him now, as if he was sick of lies, and wanted this thing over and done.

‘Mrs Carver,’ he said. ‘Don’t look at my officers – look at me. Is there anything at all you would like to discuss with me? Is there anything I need to know before we begin?’

Before we begin?

‘No,’ I said.

He nodded to DI Ure, who went to the door and lifted her head to the officers waiting at the start of the mews. The search team came inside and now they moved with a degree of urgency as they unplugged computers, emptied filing cabinets and piled the bulkier items into black rubbish bags and the smaller stuff into transparent evidence bags that were sealed and signed and carried away. They picked the place clean.

A couple of them must have gone straight to the staff toilet because one of them came back with the second phone already sealed inside a signed evidence bag and the other had left the brown envelope unsealed inside its own plastic evidence bag so that you could see the thick wad of notes poking out.

DCI Stoner held out his hands. He was wearing a pair of blue latex gloves now. He looked carefully from the evidence bags to me and back again at the money and the phone.

DI Ure was smiling at me. Skyla and Michael were watching wide-eyed as our world was taken away. DCI Stoner looked – more than anything – disappointed in me. So here was yet another person I had let down. I don’t know why they always seemed so surprised.

‘You’re going to need that lawyer now, Mrs Carver,’ DCI Stoner said.

31

Tara

The affectionate twinkle in DCI Stoner’s eye had been replaced by a cold dead light and, as he sat across from me in the sick yellow light of the interview room, he was never more like the bully who pretends to be your friend right up to the moment he has you pinned down in some isolated part of the playground.

‘Do you remember when I came to your home, Mrs Carver?’

He waited as I stared at him across the worn Formica table and then finally nodded.

‘For the tape,’ DI Ure snapped, bored beyond belief, leaning back in her chair, as if these proceedings did not concern her. ‘You can’t just nod or shake your head. How many more times? We need to hear you for the tape.’