‘Do sit down, Mr Lang.’

‘Thanks, I’d rather stand,’ I said.

Now he was genuinely thrown. We used to do this kind of thing to a geography teacher at school. He’d left after two terms to become a priest in the Western Isles.

‘What do you know, please, about Alexander Woolf?’ O’Neal leant forward with his forearms on the desk, and I caught a glimpse of a very gold watch. Much too gold to be gold.

‘Which one?’ He frowned.

‘What do you mean, "which one?" How many Alexander Woolfs do you know?’

I moved my lips slightly, counting to myself. ‘Five.’

He sighed irritably. Come along, 4B, settle down.

‘The Alexander Woolf to whom I am referring,’ he said, with that particular tone of sarcastic pedantry that every Englishman behind a desk slides into sooner or later, ‘has a house inLyall Street,Belgravia.’

‘Lyall Street. Of course.’ I tutted to myself. ‘Six, then.’ O’Neal shot a look at Solomon, but didn’t get any help there. He turned back to me, with a creepy smile.

‘I’m asking you, Mr Lang, what do you know about him?’

‘He has a house inLyall Street,Belgravia,’ I said. ‘Is that any help?’

This time, O’Neal tried another tack. He took a deep breath and exhaled slowly, which was meant to make me think that beneath that chubby frame there lurked an oiled killing machine, and for two pins he’d be over that desk and beating the life out of me. It was a pathetic performance. He reached into a drawer and pulled out a buff folder, then started angrily flicking through its contents.

‘Where were you at ten-thirty last night?’

‘Windsurfing off theIvory Coast,’ I said, almost before he’d finished speaking.

‘I’m asking you a serious question, Mr Lang,’ said O’Neal. ‘I advise you, most strongly, to give me a serious answer.’

‘And I’m telling you it’s none of your business.’

‘My business…’he began.

‘Your business is defence.’ I was suddenly shouting, genuinely shouting, and out of the corner of my eye I could see that Solomon had turned to watch. ‘And the thing you’re being paid to defend is my right to do whatever I want without having to answer a lot of fucking questions.’ I dropped back into a normal gear. ‘Anything else?’

He didn’t answer, so I turned and walked towards the door. ‘Cheerio, David,’ I said.

Solomon didn’t answer either. I had my hand on the doorknob when O’Neal spoke.

‘Lang, I want you to know that I could have you arrested the second you leave this building.’

I turned and looked at him. ‘For what?’

I suddenly didn’t like this. I didn’t like this because, for the first time since I came in, O’Neal looked relaxed. ‘Conspiracy to murder.’

The room was very quiet. ‘Conspiracy?’ I said.

You know how it is when you’re caught up in the flow of things. Normally, words are sent from the brain towards the mouth, and somewhere along the line you take a moment to check them, see that they are actually the ones you ordered and that they’re nicely wrapped, before you bundle them on their way towards your palate and out into the fresh air.

But when you’re caught up in the flow of things, the checking part of your mind can fall down on the job. O’Neal had uttered three words: ‘Conspiracy to murder’. The correct word for me to repeat in an incredulous tone of voice would have been ‘murder’; a very small, and psychiatrically disturbed, section of the population might have opted for the ‘to’; but the one word out of the three I most definitely should not have chosen to repeat was ‘conspiracy’.

Of course, if we’d had the conversation again, I’d have done things very differently. But we didn’t.

Solomon was looking at me, and O’Neal was looking at Solomon. I busied myself with a verbal dustpan and brush. ‘What the hell are you talking about? Have you really got nothing better to do? If you’re talking about that business last night, then you should know, if you’ve read my statement, that I’d never seen that man before in my life, that I was defending myself against an illegal assault, and that in the course of the struggle he… hit his head.’

I was suddenly conscious of how limp a phrase that is.

‘The police,’ I continued, ‘declared themselves fully satisfied, and…’

I stopped.

O’Neal had leaned back in his chair and put both hands behind his head. A patch of sweat the size of a ten pence piece showed at each armpit.

‘Well, of course, they would declare themselves satisfied, wouldn’t they?’ he said, looking horribly confident. He waited for me to say something, but nothing came to mind so I let him go on. ‘Because they didn’t know then what we know now.’

I sighed.

‘Oh God, I am just so fascinated by this conversation I think I might have a nosebleed. What do you know now that is so fucking important that I have to be dragged here at this frankly ridiculous time of day?’

‘Dragged?’ he said, eyebrows shooting towards his hairline. He turned to Solomon. ‘Did you drag Mr Lang here?’ O’Neal had suddenly gone camp and playful, and it was a nauseating sight. Solomon must have been as appalled by it as I was, because he didn’t answer.

‘My life is ebbing away in this room,’ I said, irritably. ‘Please get to the point.’

‘Very well,’ said O’Neal. ‘We know now, but the police didn’t know then, that a week ago you had an assignation with a Canadian arms dealer by the name of McCluskey. McCluskey offered you a hundred thousand dollars if you would… terminate Woolf. We know now that you turned up at Woolf’sLondon house and that you were confronted by a man named Rayner - aka Wyatt, aka Miller - legitimately employed by Woolf in the capacity of bodyguard. We know that Rayner was severely injured as a result of this confrontation.’

My stomach seemed to have contracted to the size and density of a cricket ball. A drop of sweat abseiled amateurishly down my back.

O’Neal went on. ‘We know that in spite of your story to the police, not one but two 999 calls were made to the operator last night; the first one being for an ambulance only, the second for the police. The calls were made fifteen minutes apart. We know that you gave a false name to the police, for reasons we have not yet established. And finally,’ he looked up at me like a bad magician with a rabbit-filled hat, ‘we know that the sum of twenty-nine thousand, four hundred pounds, equivalent to fifty thousand US dollars, was transferred to your bank account at Swiss Cottage four days ago.’ He snapped the file shut and smiled. ‘How’s that for starters?’