She shrugged. ‘I could say that I suspect him to be capable of doing unpleasant things, but that might be just hindsight.’

I wanted to believe her but I didn’t know whether I did. I tried to tell myself that it didn’t matter either way. I’d been hired to do a job and I’d get paid however it turned out, whether it helped Cy’s case or not. Those were the rules. But rules didn’t seem to matter too much at the moment. I felt a kind of sadistic need to crack through her hard shell of composure.

‘You shouldn’t have told Cy you loved your husband. If it’s not true it makes him vulnerable every time he asserts it.’

She’d been staring at the ground in front of her shoes. Now she lifted her head and looked straight at me. Those dark, slanted eyes seemed to weigh and assess me according to a finely graduated and completely accurate system. ‘The broken nose and the careless shave and the cheap haircut don’t inspire confidence, but you’re not stupid, are you?’

‘Only sometimes,’ I said, meaning it.

‘I didn’t tell Sackville I loved Julius. He assumed it. Does he have a young, handsome wife?’

‘Yes.’

She shrugged. ‘There you go. Transference.’

‘Why didn’t you love him?’

She was staring at the ground again. ‘That sounds like one of your stupid questions. Love, not love, in love, out of love, what does it all mean really? You can love someone one day and not the next; you can love two people at once and then no-one at all. It’s a cheap word and it’s been debased.’

I couldn’t argue with that. She lit another cigarette and smoked even less of it than the previous one before grinding it out.

‘Your husband must have had some knowledge of Van Kep when he took him on. References or something such. Where are his business records?’

‘I don’t know. I knew almost nothing about his business.’

‘Did he have an assistant, a 2IC?’

She gave me that look again. ‘I thought you’d be poking around in the underworld, using your sleazy contacts to investigate Van Kep.’