names for the tape. Both names strike Joe as being entirely bland and he makes no further attempt to remember them.
Over the sergeant’s shoulder there is a large mirror. Joe looks into it and feels sure his mother is on the other side. He tries to remember what she has told him about how people behave in police interviews, what the right things to do are, and what will suggest his guilt. He wonders when, exactly, he started to apply the word guilt to himself.
The questions begin. He is asked about his relationship with Dora Hardwick, how long he knew her, how often he saw her, what they talked about, whether they’d had any falling out. He answers fully and frankly and knows that this is only the beginning. The two detectives take turns, and when he is certain they cannot possibly ask him anything more about Dora, they switch to Bella.
‘And you’re paid nothing for all this time you spend counselling homeless people?’ the sergeant asks, when they’ve exhausted the Bella-related questions.
‘You can’t take money from people who don’t have it,’ Joe tells them.
At a nod from his sergeant, the constable switches on a wall-mounted screen.
‘We were lucky in our TV appeal,’ the sergeant says. ‘A hardware shop on Fitzroy Street archives all its CCTV footage and they went back to the period shortly after the last known sighting of Dora Hardwick.’
The footage starts to play. Joe can read the date in the bottom right hand corner of the screen, but the constable confirms it for him all the same.
‘This is Friday the twenty-sixth of July, eight thirty in the evening,’ he says. ‘Three days after your last appointment with her in the church hall.’
The scene is a Cambridge city street, not far from where Felicity lives. Joe watches three students walk along the pavement closest to the shop and a West Indian woman push a baby stroller in the opposite direction before Dora appears.
‘That’s Dora,’ he confirms, and then finally they ask him the question that counts.
The sergeant says, ‘Can you tell me where you were on the night of Friday the twenty-sixth of July?’
‘I was out walking the streets,’ Joe replies. ‘Looking for the homeless.’
* * *
He is left alone. He realises, after several seconds, that he is sitting with his head in his hands.
He feels as though his whole life has been building up to this – the moment when everything falls apart – and yet he has no idea what he could have done differently. Ezzy? He’d just wanted to help her. Bella too. It is not entirely impossible, he realises, that he will be charged with murder. It will break his mum. And his kids. Sarah will have to take them out of the city.
The door opens. Expecting the forgettable sergeant and her unmemorable sidekick he is surprised to see Delilah clutching two steaming mugs. Another detective follows with a plate of custard creams and both take their seats. Delilah gives a heavy sigh and can’t meet her son’s eyes. Joe looks at the biscuits and thinks, as last meals go, this one sucks.
He waits to see if they have actually sent his mother to charge him. It seems beyond cruel, although he wouldn’t put it past her to volunteer for the job, to prove she was entirely incorruptible.
‘What happens now?’ He wonders if this might be the moment when he accepts, once and for all, that his mum can’t make everything right.
‘We have a cup of tea,’ she says. ‘I put sugar in. I know you don’t take it, but you look like you need it. Biscuit?’
She can’t seem to look at him, but he does what he is told. The biscuit is stale and he takes a childish pleasure in putting it down on the table with only a bite missing.
‘We tracked down Dora’s shopping trolley,’ Delilah says. ‘We got a call first thing from a student who worked at the punt hire place on Silver Street last summer. He remembers finding one exactly like it in a punt early one morning. It was put in lost property and disposed of at the end of the season.’
‘He checked the lost property log for us,’ the other detective adds. ‘It was found on the morning of Saturday the twenty-seventh of July, meaning it was left there sometime the previous night.’
‘Probably thrown from Silver Street Bridge, intending to go into the water,’ Delilah adds. ‘Bad luck for the killer that it landed on a