‘Of course,’ he said, keeping some of the sarcasm in his tone. ‘And how did you take it?’

‘Not very well, did you, Sammy?’ weighed in his mum, as she placed a hand on her son’s back. ‘Poor Sammy was stuck in his bedroom for ages. Didn’t want to come out, did you?’

‘Mum… he’s come to see me, not you.’

‘Right. Sorry, darling. You tell the detective, sweetheart.’

Sammy shot his overbearing mum an admonishing glare before turning back to Tomek. ‘I… I really liked her. I thought she was the one, but I guess it wasn’t to be. I’d talked to her about moving out and maybe moving in with her, picking up my life and moving closer to her. I was willing to do whatever it took to make it work, but she didn’t want any of that.’

‘She told you?’

‘Well, no, not exactly…’ Sammy set the controller down on the counter and removed his headphones. ‘But I guess that’s what she meant when she said we were in different places, we wanted different things.’

Tomek understood her reasons for breaking up with him, and part of him thought there was more to it than just a simple trajectory problem – a lot more. Perhaps it had been his immaturity, or the fact he had an overbearing mum who still hadn’t pulled her hand from his back.

But what he was struggling to understand was how the two had got together in the first place.

‘How did you first meet?’ Tomek asked.

‘On a night out. At a bar in Leigh. We got talking by accident, and then she eventually let me have her number. We spoke a couple of times after that and then I asked her out on a date. The rest just sort of went from there.’

Tomek nodded. Nothing out of the ordinary. A fairly standard, if not archaic, way of meeting people. Nowadays it all seemed to be online, with the likes of Tinder, Bumble, Plenty of Fish – and loads of other randomly named apps that were the benchmark for creating relationships in the twenty-first century.

‘When was the last time you spoke to Angelica?’ Tomek asked, taking a sudden change in direction.

So far, Sammy had been more than accommodating in answering his questions, despite his earlier protestations, but now he seized up, placing a hand on his controller again, as though it was his safety blanket. Either that or he was going to use the end to strike Tomek over the head. In which case, Tomek wanted to witness that. He could do with a laugh.

‘A while ago,’ he said, cagey.

‘Could you be more specific?’

He turned his head to the side, keeping his eyes fixed on Tomek’s. ‘Why do you wanna know?’

‘Because she was found dead this morning. We’re conducting witness and character interviews as part of our routine enquiries. As her most recent boyfriend, we’ve come to hopefully exclude you from our investigation.’

Sammy dropped the controller onto the counter. His mum reached around him and embraced him, sobbing for some reason; sobbing over the woman she’d met a handful of times. Meanwhile, Sammy’s face was blank, expressionless, looking like he’d just been asked to complete a sudoku for the first time.

‘She’s dead?’ he repeated, his voice weak.

‘Sadly, yes.’

‘When? How?’

Tomek gave him the boilerplate answers. That they were still looking into it, that they couldn’t say too much while the investigation was still ongoing.

‘I can’t believe it,’ Sammy continued. ‘I… it was only a couple of weeks ago when I last spoke to her.’

‘You did? What did you talk about?’

‘Well… maybe that was wrong of me to say. Let me rephrase. I messaged her, asking how she was and if she wanted to catch up or meet at all, but she didn’t reply. She ghosted me.’

That was a new term Tomek was going to have to get used to. Good thing he’d heard it from someone else without having to embarrass both himself and Kasia by asking her.

‘When was the last time you heard from Angelica?’

Sammy reached into his trouser pocket and pulled out his phone. He unlocked the device and scrolled through his messages with his ex-girlfriend.

‘The last time she replied was December, just to say Merry Christmas.’

‘Right. And how many times had you tried to make contact with her?’

Sammy made a quick count. ‘Twenty,’ he replied candidly, without any hint of embarrassment or shame in his voice. Twenty times in less than three months. Tomek didn’t think he’d messaged Abigail that many times and they’d known each other for years. Now he understood what Elodie Locket had meant when she’d said that Sammy had taken the break up poorly.

‘When was the last time you saw her in person?’ Tomek asked.

‘When we broke up. At least she had the dignity to do it to my face rather than over the phone. I don’t think I could have handled that. Afterwards, I tried going to some of the places that I knew she went to, some of her usual haunts, but she was never there. I wanted to bump into her, maybe have a chat, see if we could get things off the ground again, but I think she’d started hanging out with new crowds because I never saw her anywhere.’

Probably because she was trying to avoid you, Tomek thought. Nor could he blame her. He would have done the same had someone like Sammy been in his life. The man should have concerned him, but he didn’t. He didn’t get the impression that the man was a killer. In a video game, yes. But in real life, with a woman he lusted over and wanted to make a relationship work with? Tomek wasn’t so sure.

But it wasn’t definitive. He’d been wrong in the past and was prepared to admit he could be wrong again. Until he asked the last question he had for Sammy.

‘What were you doing two nights ago?’

‘I was online, with some of my mates.’

‘At two am?’

‘Hmm. By that point, I was probably asleep.’

‘You didn’t drive to her house at all?’

‘No.’

‘She was seen leaving her house at just before two in the morning. It’s the last time she was seen alive.’

He shrugged. ‘Couldn’t have been me.’

‘No?’

‘No, mate. I can’t drive.’

CHAPTER TWENTY

Tomek pulled the car to a stop and switched off the ignition. Rain gently pattered against the windscreen. He let out a deep, heavy sigh. The hairs on the back of his neck were raised. Not from the soothing sound of the rain hitting the metal tin encompassing him, but because he was angry, frustrated. Something along the drive from the office, somewhere along the route he’d done so many times, had reminded him of the letter he’d received from Nathan Burrows.

Did Dawid ever tell you that he came to visit me once?

That his brother had visited Michał’s killer and not said anything infuriated him.