‘I saw him once.’ A tall, skinny boy with a scrubby beard. ‘Didn’t look like he was enjoying himself much.’

There were nods and murmurs of agreement from the rest of the group. Seven of them were gathered in a corner of the main bar at the Rocket Club: four girls and three boys. A few stared into takeaway coffees and three of them passed a large bottle of water between them. The place stank of beer and the uncarpeted area of the floor around the bar itself was sticky with it.

‘Greg preferred to stay at home and study,’ Holland said. ‘That it?’

The skinny boy shrugged. ‘Yeah, he worked pretty hard, but he wasn’t mental about it or anything. I think he just hated the music in here.’

‘He liked jazz,’ the blonde girl said. ‘Weird Scandinavian stuff. We used to take the piss ’cause it sounded so shit.’

Thorne tried to hide a smile. A taste in music that others thought dubious was something he and Greg Macken had obviously shared. ‘So, why was he here on Saturday?’

‘And the Saturday before that,’ the boy said. ‘Been in here a few times, since the start of term.’

‘Right. So what was different?’

There were a few seconds of silence, save for some slightly awkward shifting of feet and slurpings of coffee. An overweight Asian girl with a purple streak through her hair smiled sadly as she reached forward for the bottle of water. ‘He had the hots for this bloke,’ she said.

‘The man some of you saw him talking to?’

A few of them nodded.

Thorne well understood the hesitation. It was strange how the stuff of everyday gossip became something far harder to discuss when the person it concerned had been murdered. ‘You saw him in here with the same bloke before last Saturday?’ he asked.

The Asian girl said that she had. ‘I think he came in the first couple of times to keep an eye on his sister, you know? Then he saw this guy he fancied, so he kept coming back.’

‘You saw them talking before?’

‘No, not talking. Not until Saturday.’

‘What happened on Saturday?’

‘I think it just took Greg that long to pluck up the courage.’

‘He wasn’t exactly… confident.’ The girl with the lip-ring started to cry. The boy with the beard moved his chair closer and draped an arm around her shoulders. ‘Probably needed to get a few drinks inside him first.’

Thorne nodded. Gay or straight, eighteen or eighty, he knew how that worked. But whatever shyness had held Greg Macken back until Saturday evening, Thorne was struck by just how confident his killer had been. Happy enough to stalk his victim, then wait for him to make the first move.

‘Was Greg drunk, do you think?’ Holland asked. ‘By the time he left?’

The Asian girl shook her head. ‘A bit of Dutch courage, but that’s about it. I spoke to him half an hour before I noticed he’d gone and he sounded fine.’ Her head dropped. ‘He was… excited.’

The post-mortem would tell them how much Greg Macken had drunk on the night he died. Thorne was also interested to see what the toxicology report had to say. It had been suggested that the killer might have slipped something into Macken’s drink – Rohypnol or liquid ecstasy maybe – though Thorne wondered, if that were the case, why the killer had felt the need to smash Macken’s head in before bringing out the plastic bag.

‘So, did anyone see them leave together?’

The blonde girl said that she couldn’t swear to it. ‘But, you know, Greg wasn’t here and neither was the bloke he’d been talking to.’

‘I saw them by the door,’ the skinny boy said. ‘Next time I looked, they’d gone, so I just assumed…’

Thorne held up a hand to let them know that it didn’t matter too much. If the CCTV panned out, it wouldn’t matter at all. ‘Tell me about this bloke,’ he said.

‘He was older than most of the people in here,’ the Asian girl said. ‘Thirty-ish, I reckon.’

Thorne asked if that was unusual, and the students explained that anyone could pay to come in on nights when there were bands playing. Besides, there were always a few mature students around.

‘He looked… sure of himself,’ the blonde girl said.

The skinny boy agreed. ‘I thought he looked like a right cocky sod, to be honest.’

The Asian girl said he’d seemed relaxed, happy even, and eventually admitted – though she couldn’t look anywhere but at the floor as she did – that if Greg hadn’t been so obviously interested, she might have made a move herself.

The students began to give a more detailed physical description; the three who had got the best look at the man edged closer to the table as Holland took notes. While they argued about the colour of the man’s shirt and how far off the collar his hair had been, Thorne took a seat next to a girl who had not spoken at all.

She had long dark hair and wore a sensible coat. She looked about fourteen.

‘I take it you didn’t see much,’ Thorne said.

‘I wasn’t here,’ the girl said. Her voice was quiet, Home Counties. ‘I’m a friend of Alex. We were next door watching the band.’ As soon as she’d said the name, her lip had begun to tremble and Thorne was reaching into the pocket of his leather jacket for tissues. The girl beat him to it, pressing a crumpled wad into the corner of each eye and speaking through delicate, childlike sobs. ‘We were supposed to be having lunch on Sunday,’ she said. ‘A bit optimistic, considering how hammered we both were by the time we’d left, but that was the plan. A big Sunday roast in some pub somewhere. Alex could have eaten for England, you know?’ She dropped her hands into her lap, squeezed the tissue between them. ‘I felt so rough the next day that I never even got round to calling her.’

‘Come on,’ Thorne said. He didn’t bother telling her that any such call would have gone unanswered.

‘Then, you know, she didn’t come in on Monday morning. I never spoke to her again.’ Her hands moved back to her face, and when she finally took away the sodden lump of tissue there was a shiny string of snot between her nose and her fingers. She kept very still as Thorne leaned across and wiped it away.

Once a consensus of sorts had been reached on the description, the students were allowed to go, with a reminder for them to get in touch should they remember anything else. As they trooped slowly out, they passed Yvonne Kitson on her way in, and Thorne saw her entrance earn more than a casual backward glance from the skinny boy with the scraggy beard. Kitson saw it too, and did not seem displeased.

‘Careful,’ Holland said. ‘That’s only a notch above kiddie-fiddling.’

‘Is it?’ Kitson’s face was the picture of innocence. ‘So neither of you fancied the blonde?’

Neither of them said anything.

Kitson smiled and sat down. ‘Right, we’ve got no cameras in the bar, unfortunately, but they’re on all the staircases, in the main lobby and at the front door. So, we should have something to go through by late afternoon.’ She reached into her handbag and began reapplying lipstick. ‘Did we get a decent description?’

‘We got one,’ Thorne said. ‘Different from the one the Leicester boys were given, and different from the one we got from Emily Walker’s neighbour.’

‘So, they’re all unreliable.’

‘That’s always a possibility.’

‘Or we’ve got someone who makes an effort to change his appearance. ’

Holland looked from one DI to the other. ‘What’s that all about, then? Part of the kick he’s getting, do you reckon?’ He shook his head as though he were answering his own question. ‘Maybe it’s one of those multiple-personalities things.’

‘No chance.’ Kitson shook her head and dropped the lipstick back in her bag. ‘Let his defence team try that kind of cobblers on when the time comes. He probably just enjoys pissing us about.’

‘Fine with me.’ Thorne picked up the empty cups from the floor and placed them on the table. ‘They’re usually the ones who get careless. ’

‘Like Garvey,’ Holland said. ‘He slipped up eventually.’