Williams flipped open his notebook. ‘Ms Truscott was found in her home at eight am this morning by a woman who’d come to clean. She was in her bed in an upstairs room. She’d been shot in the temple at close range.’

Lily’s bedroom: upstairs like mine, sparsely furnished and untidy like mine-books by the bed, clothes on chairs, coffee mugs, baby oil, tissues… I put two spoonfuls of sugar into my coffee, stirred it and didn’t say anything. I couldn’t speak; the picture in my head was too stark, too wrong.

Williams sipped his flat white and then finished it in a couple of gulps, as if he needed the fuel for what he had to do. He drew in a deep breath. ‘I’m going to have to get a statement from you about your relationship with Ms Truscott, about where you’ve been over the past twenty-four hours, and I have to take possession of the pistol registered to you as a private investigator but that you are no longer entitled to use or possess.’

‘Okay,’ I said.

It jolted him. ‘Just okay?’

I drank some coffee and found it bitter despite the sugar. ‘No, it’s not okay. As of now nothing in the fucking world is okay, but I’ll play along until you piss me off so much that I’ll do something everybody will regret-you, me, my lawyer, everybody except the media. Understand?’

He didn’t respond.

‘Enjoying this, are you?’ I said.

It was just a throwaway, letting-off-steam remark, but his reaction was strange, as if he’d been seriously challenged. He recovered quickly, though.

‘I was told you were difficult,’ he said.

The Glebe police station was only two blocks away. Williams used his mobile to get the loan of a room and recording equipment and we walked there. He lit a cigarette as soon as he closed the phone. I was glad he didn’t offer me one because I might have weakened. On the walk I scarcely heard the traffic or felt the pavement under my feet. I was numb, dead to sensation. Williams had to haul me back before I stepped out against a red light into the path of a bus.