“Tell me.”

“Most people concluded he took the money and that you probably died anyway.”

I asked her how it had gone on for fourteen months. That was the thing I could not construct. A lie that size needs feeding.

“He was very good,” Dolores said. “I want you to understand that I’m not stupid, and neither is Marisol, and neither is anybody on that floor. He fed it constantly and he fed it small.”

She had examples. She had, I realised somewhere in the second hour, been going over this for two years the way you go over a car accident.

He would come in for half a day and be visibly not slept. He would be found in a stairwell once by a woman from procurement, sitting down, and would say he was fine and ask her not to mention it, which of course guaranteed it went round the floor by lunchtime.