Page 146 of Crocodile Tears

“You know the type, then – sneaky shits, always on the take. Chris wasn’t like that, so I kinda thought I should like him, but I never did. At least the rats don’t hide how shitty they are. They’re honest, in their own way, and you know where you stand with them, but I never felt that way about Chris.”

“Can you give me an example?”

“Well, sometimes I’d spook myself by coming up behind him when he was concentrating on the weights and his mind was elsewhere, and for a second it was like seeing a stranger staring back. I didn’t know who the hell he was, man. Used to creep me out.”

“I know the feeling,” Josiah murmured.

“So, if you’re asking me if he could’a killed Mr Dacre and then driven to his session with me and gone through with it, cold as ice, then I have to tell you, man – yeah, I think he could.”

“I see.”

That tallied with what both Dacre’s solicitor and the housekeeper had said, and also with Josiah’s own experience.

“Can you confirm the time he was here on that day?”

“Nah – but we’ll have the security footage.”

D’Angelo led him downstairs to a back office and left him alone to watch the recording.

Alexander arrived at 9.15a.m. on the day of the murder, wearing the outfit he’d been dressed in when he was arrested, his face expressionless as he checked in.

He disappeared from view as he went into the men’s changing room, but emerged a few minutes later in his kit and ran up the stairs to the gym.

Two hours later he ran back down, covered in sweat. Fifteen minutes after that, he came out of the changing room with damp hair, wearing the clothes he’d arrived in and carrying his gym bag. Then he left.

There was nothing that didn’t match with Alexander’s testimony. There was a seventy-five-minute gap between him leaving the gym andarriving back at Dacre’s house – a journey of fifteen minutes – but Alexander had said he liked to drive around when he had the opportunity.

After leaving the gym, Josiah put in a call to Reed. “The route Alexander told us he took after he left the gym – do we have any CCTV footage to back that up?”

“Some of it. We don’t have CCTV of the entire route, so there’s no visuals of him for about thirty minutes of his journey. However, we know Dacre was already dead by then. He was killed either before Alexander left the house or within an hour and a half of him leaving, because that’s when the housekeeper arrived. Why?”

“Just making sure we’ve checked out his alibi completely.”

“Okay. Are you coming back to the office now? Only, there’s something here you really need to see…”

The press was still outside when Josiah returned to Inquisitus. He pushed his way through, ignoring their frantic questions.

He found Reed, Esther, and Mel all gathered around Reed’s desk, looking at a padded yellow envelope.

“What are you all staring at? Is it a bomb?” he demanded, taking off his jacket.

“No – more like a smoking gun,” Esther replied. “And it’s addressed to you.”

“To me?” He reached out to pick up the envelope, only to find his way blocked by Esther’s wheelchair.

“Not so fast, Joe. It arrived in the morning’s post. It’s been through our usual vetting procedure, and we found this.”

She nodded at Mel, who projected a holoimage of the envelope into the air, showing the clear outline of a gun inside.

“We’re treating it as evidence, obviously,” Mel said, raising her latex-clad hands. Opening the envelope gingerly, she removed the gun and examined it. “Pre-R Walther P99, serial number filed off.”

“Is there anything else?” Josiah pulled on his own set of gloves and fished out a small lightbox from the envelope.

He clicked on it and a holovid immediately filled the air, showing himself escorting Alexander into the Inquisitus building on the day he’d arrested him. The date was visible at the top of the image.

“Clearly downloaded from a news site,” Josiah observed.

“So, this is likely to be the gun used in Dacre’s murder?” Reed suggested.

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