But Detective Chief Inspector John Stoner was different.

DCI Stoner was a naturally big man grown even larger with time, and all of the empty calories of his fifty years. His repeatedly broken nose gave his face a rakish look, and his bulk seemed squeezed into everything – his dark blue suit, glossy at the elbows, the interview room, and the chair across the table from me. Around his nose and his eyes was a map of little red lines, the broken capillaries of the dedicated drinker. He placed his giant paws on the table between us and on the third finger of his left hand, his thick golden wedding band strained angrily against his flesh. Introducing himself, DCI Stoner was friendly, sympathetic even, but it was like having the school bully on your side in the playground. There was the feeling that, no matter how smiley they were, it could all change in a moment.

And it was when DCI Stoner appeared in the interview room that I understood the police believed I had killed James Caine.

What was the worst night of my life was for him just another day at the office.

DCI Stoner had seen it all before. I was nothing new to DCI Stoner.

‘So you confronted James Caine about your wife,’ he said, the very first thing he said, still squeezing himself into the chair on the other side of the table. ‘I don’t blame you. I would have confronted him too.’

‘As I told DI Ure—’

He silenced me with a small lift of his chin, grinning to take the edge off the gesture.

‘And now you have to tell me,’ he said.

So I did.

‘I thought this guy – this man – he was someone who had come to look at my house,’ I said. ‘That’s what he pretended. And then I started to think maybe he was sick in the head. I don’t know what I thought. Some kind of stalker. He talked about Tara – my wife – as if he knew her. And so when they left the house – Caine and his daughter – I followed him into the street.’

‘And what did you say to him?’

‘I waited until the girl got into the car and closed the door. And then I asked him – who are you? What do you want?’

Is that what I had said or was that only in my head? I did not remember the exact words. What I remembered was the threat, the sense of real dread, the feeling that this man was a danger to all that I loved.

‘What did he do?’ DCI Stoner said.

‘He smiled, as if he knew things that I would never know. Secrets.’

‘So you told him what any man would tell him,’ DCI Stoner said, prompting me.

‘I just told him – stay away from my family.’

‘And what did he say?

‘He laughed at me. I felt like he had come there to laugh at me. But I knew something had happened between him and Tara. Because he acted as if he knew her. I thought – I don’t know what I thought. I thought maybe he was someone who had seen her online or an old boyfriend or something. But from the past. The distant past.’