Woods is shouting so loudly that I can’t entirely make out what he’s saying.

‘The IPCC is going to be all over us now… and the press, Jesus fucking Christ Riley, what a complete and utter cock-up! Do you realise what they’ll do to you if they get wind that you were actually fucking the suspect, screwing a serial killer for God’s sakes? They’ll bury you, Riley, bury you – and me with you no doubt!’

His pacing is getting shorter, like he’s about to start walking in circles. This is the angriest I’ve ever seen him, maybe it’s the angriest he’s ever been in his life. He looks and sounds like a different man.

‘Who exactly knows about this…? Who knows that you and the suspect were in a relationship?’ He runs his fingers through his thinning hair manically. I don’t know why people do that, run their fingers through their hair when they’re under duress. I can’t see how it could make you think any clearer.

‘No one, Sir,’ I say, ‘though I think, well, I think Lucy Davis may have got an inkling… But we weren’t in a relationship, not as such… We weren’t fuc— I wasn’t sleeping with her.’

He shoots me a look of disbelief.

‘Look, we met online, one of those dating websites, you know, matches you up with potential singles in your area. We started messaging, met up for coffee briefly. I took her out for a meal, we walked in the park…’ I shake my head like it’s not my own. ‘The shock, when I saw her photograph in the estate agent’s file…’ I can hear the emotion in my voice, like it belongs to someone else, like I can’t really believe it myself. ‘I was just looking for, oh I don’t know. I liked her, Sir…’ I say quietly, ‘I had no idea, not even the slightest suspicion. Not even for a second, right up until I saw her photograph.’

Woods stops pacing. ‘Sit down, Dan,’ he says, his voice levelling off.

I do as he says and pull up a chair.

He’s running his fingers through his hair again and I feel like a naughty schoolboy: embarrassed and awkward.

‘So you met online. She gave you a false ID?’

‘Well, she obviously didn’t announce herself as a serial killer.’ I’m being facetious but I can’t help it. ‘She told me her name was Florence Williams and that she was studying to be an actress—’

‘You didn’t check her out, run her name through the system?’

‘I had no reason to disbelieve her. Jesus, and I thought I was the cynic.’

Woods sighs. ‘So it was pure coincidence, just a horrible, dreadful piece of bad luck?’

‘It’s my middle name Sir.’ I’m being facetious again, I can’t frigging help it. Woods brings it out in me. ‘If they’re not being killed by someone else, they’re the ones doing the killing.’ I think he gets the irony, the regret in my words disguised by lame humour.

‘You should’ve come straight to me the moment you discovered you were sleeping with the enemy, why didn’t you Riley?’

‘Well, I wasn’t sleeping with the enemy. We didn’t… I didn’t… Jesus, I couldn’t,’ and I feel it then, I feel my soul emptying out, my humanity rushing to the surface. All those feelings; pride, confusion, sadness, happiness, hate, the complexity of everything I feel coming at me at once, a horrible paradox, a fruit salad of fuckery. ‘I couldn’t sleep with her because of Rachel…’ the words leave me of their own accord, ‘betraying her, I felt I would be betraying her. Rachel’s memory stopped me. I couldn’t do it… however, whoever, she turned out to be.’

Woods looks at me then, a strange kind of expression that I don’t want to indulge. Is it empathy? Or worse, pity?

‘Or perhaps it was a different reason, Riley.’ He bangs his fist on the table, startling me. ‘Perhaps it was that you knew a good woman from a bad and your instincts, those instincts that have made you the man – the copper you are now – standing in front of me, they stopped you…’

There’s this moment, this moment between us, where suddenly I see him as a human being, I see his humanity and his anger as vulnerability, and he’s given it to me, he’s put it out there first somehow. He’s telling me to come back to myself. And I see how much he believes in me and respects me, his faith in me and how much it takes for him to see that in someone. Actually, what I see is that he likes me. He doesn’t understand me maybe, but he likes me. Above all else, he is on my side. And if someone is on your side it’s worth a lot. It is golden.

‘The boy, the baby was missing. I knew I could get her to come to me. The photo was published in the press that night. I told Davis to hold off on the conference but it was too late… I knew, I thought there was the chance she would abscond—’

‘But for Dan’s big dick, eh?’

I want to laugh. The whole thing is laughable really, absurd. I have this strange feeling, like he wants to hold me for a second. It’s in that moment that I realise he’s going to bury it. He’s going to bury it and I’m not sure I want saving.

‘You knew the suspect intimately and told no one… you arranged to meet her without proper back-up, and then the mad bitch goes and swallows poison and dies in our custody!’

He doesn’t give me time to respond. ‘Procedure,’ he says, ‘you know it as well as I do. You put yourself at risk, the whole operation, you withheld information from the team, you took unorthodox measures—’

I nod. I’m tired. ‘I got the result we wanted,’ I say, quietly, ‘George was found safe and she as good as confessed to both murders.’

Woods smiles like I’ve just told him a secret he already knew.

I continue to explain that I knew she would come to meet me. This way, the way I played it, pretty much guaranteed an arrest. I tell him how I used our relationship as a means to capture Rebecca Harper and that while it was a gamble, I felt it was one I had to take. As I’m telling him all of this, I can hear how ridiculous it all sounds, how unbelievable.

I watch Woods, the strange, funny man he is.

‘This was found among the stuff in her lock-up,’ he says, placing a folder onto the desk and nodding at it. ‘She knew who you were, Dan.’

I look down at the table. Scared to open the folder, but I do, tentatively. I pick it up. Look at it. It’s a scrapbook filled with newspaper and internet cuttings of Rachel’s death and the trial. There’s a picture of me, taken when I had given a short statement to the press after Mathers’ sentencing. There’s one of me and Rachel too, an inset photo of us together at a friend’s fortieth birthday party – my arm around her – and one of Rach on her bike, in her leathers, holding her helmet underneath her arm, smiling.

‘She knew for a while.’