‘She’s… she’s dead. Angelica? And you’re… you’re sure it’s her?’

Tomek nodded.

‘And… you want to speak with me… but you’ve already spoken to my dad. And you want to speak with me…’

‘We already are talking,’ Tomek replied then added, ‘Sort of.’

‘Right. Yes… yes, we are. But, what… what…?’

Tomek sensed the man was going to have trouble with the final question, so decided to help him out. ‘What do I want to speak to you about? Easy. I want to know everything about your relationship. When was the last time you saw her? How frequently you saw her. Where you were Friday night. That sort of thing.’

Cole’s face remained expressionless, his mouth still open. However, the strand of saliva had now snapped and disappeared back into his mouth. ‘Could I have a drink, please?’ the man asked.

‘A drink?’

‘Water. I need water.’

Tomek swivelled in the chair and looked through the windows in the room, searching for a water fountain. When he couldn’t see one, he climbed out of the chair, exited the room and asked the nearest colleague.

‘Water?’ the man asked, confused, as though he’d never heard of it before.

‘Yeah. The liquid. We need some in there.’

The man tilted forward in his seat to look at Cole. ‘I thought he would get it for you.’

Tomek turned to look at the man still sitting there, staring into nothing. ‘He’s just doing some really deep thinking in there at the moment. I offered to help while he processed some things.’

A moment later, he had two cups of water in hand and returned to the room. He set one down in front of Cole and returned to his seat. The man picked it up and slowly held it to his lips.

‘You good?’

‘Yeah,’ Cole whispered. The intonation in his voice belied his choice of words.

‘Excellent. Let’s start with your relationship with Angelica, shall we? When did the two of you start dating?’

‘Two years ago, roughly.’

‘And how long were you going out for?’

‘About six months.’

‘Who ended it?’

‘I did.’

‘Why?’

‘It… I, I, I wasn’t interested in anything long term.’

‘And she was all right with that?’

Finally, Cole closed his mouth and swallowed. As he spoke, he was unable to meet Tomek’s gaze, and he continued to stare into the wall behind him, as though he were a sleeper agent who’d just been activated by a key phrase.

‘She felt the same way,’ he explained.

‘So what happened after that? Why was she round yours the other week? Have the two of you tried to rekindle your relationship?’

‘Sex.’

Cole said it so abruptly that Tomek thought the man was propositioning him.

‘Sorry?’

‘Sex. It’s…’ He trailed off, closed his eyes and shook his head. When he opened them again, he met Tomek’s gaze for the first time. ‘It was just sex. Has been for the past four or five months or so. She… she DM’d me at the end of summer, when she got back from her season, October time, and we’ve been sleeping together ever since, friends with benefits type of thing.’

Tomek was familiar with the term, just as he was familiar with the term Netflix and Chill, which involved neither Netflix nor the act of chilling.

‘When was the last time you saw her? When your mum and dad went out, or more recently?’

Cole paused a beat. ‘That was the last time, yeah. We were supposed to meet up the other night, but she cancelled ’cause she said she was going to a party.’

‘Do you know which one and where?’

Cole shook his head, his pristine hair holding firm against the movement.

‘And what were you doing three nights ago?’

‘What night was that? Friday? I… I was out with this lot.’ He pointed to the team outside the window. ‘We were at the pub.’

‘Which one?’

‘Paul Pry. We went for a few after work. Bit of a tradition on a Friday. We usually stay till late, then regret it the next day.’

Tomek made a mental note.

‘Speaking of regrets,’ he said, ‘it’s also come to our attention that Angelica was pregnant. You didn’t by any chance happen to know anything about that, did you?’

Cole scratched the back of his neck. ‘She’d told me, yes. I knew. But… she didn’t know whose it was. She didn’t know if it was mine or someone else’s.’

‘Do you know who else it could have been?’

He shrugged. ‘She didn’t elaborate, and I was too stunned to ask. I just assumed it was mine. She would have got pregnant around Christmas, New Year time, and at that point she’d come over about four times. She was lonely. Got that seasonal depression thing, plus I think she’d just found out that they weren’t keeping her on for this summer.’

‘They weren’t keeping her on?’ Tomek repeated.

‘Yeah. She got really upset about it. Devastated, I think she was. She said she just needed someone to keep her company.’

‘Did you use protection?’