The way she tells it, the faked disappearance and insurance fraud scheme simply didn’t exist. Kit would never have been stupid enough to agree to a plan like that, even if she’d been stupid enough to suggest it. Yes, it is true that on 27 December she told her boss and a couple of Kit’s friends that Kit had gone AWOL over Christmas and she was sick with worry, but she wouldn’t have dreamt of notifying the police, not when she knew how much he liked to party. He’d stayed out all night several times in the months preceding his death, on one occasion with the defendant himself, whose partner had told Melia personally how angry she’d been.

Richard backs her story up: she’d told him Kit had gone missing but made no mention of having reported his disappearance to the police; rather, she expected him to return at any time. The idea that the police were involved had entered office channels via Clare – and Clare’s information had come directly from me.

Yes, she’d tried to get hold of the defendant a few times during this anxious period, and his partner, who was also her friend and colleague, but neither of us picked up her calls. And yes, it was true that on the occasion of our visit to her flat on Tiding Street, Clare and I had spoken about liaising with the police, but Melia had not fully comprehended such references and had thought the exchange hypothetical.

Then, sure enough, Kit reappeared on the Saturday after Christmas with his tail between his legs, and in the chaos of the holiday season she hadn’t thought to let people know. She ‘kind of feared’ others guessed they had a volatile relationship and felt a bit embarrassed about her earlier ‘overreaction’. According to her, Kit then began some sort of amateur rehab programme in the flat, supervised by Nurse Melia. Attempts by the defendant to contact her by text message were rebuffed because she wanted to concentrate on her husband’s health and in any case regretted her extramarital fling. Of course there wasn’t any lovers’ code, she wasn’t a teenager! Do not contact me meant ‘Do not contact me’. A distressing incident in a local café on Sunday the 29th reinforced her belief that her relationship with the defendant had been a disastrous error of judgement – and Kit’s friendship with him, too (his alcohol abuse had got far worse since they’d begun commuting to work together).

And so the lie turns the truth into a madman’s conspiracy theory, with a string of plausible witnesses to support it, such as the bartender at the Hope & Anchor, who recounts my visit on 28 December in search of Kit: I’d struck him as ‘unstable’ and ‘paranoid’, it transpires. He had wondered about my scratched face and injured hand.

It was a burn! (It really was a burn.)

And such as Elodie, who for good measure had heard Melia phone Kit from the café on the afternoon of the 29th to check on him. She confirms the ‘harassment’ on my part: ‘He was desperate to find Kit. I would characterize him as not in control of himself. To be honest, he scared me.’

Can Elodie tell the court her profession? Yes, she is a carer in a nursing home for elderly ex-servicemen and women.

Of course she is.

No, Melia is terribly sorry, but she can’t name anyone else who saw Kit during those fraught few days of withdrawal, but he was obviously alive, wasn’t he, since it is an undisputed fact that he died in the early hours of January the 1st. On the night in question, newly sober and inexplicably nocturnal, he had ventured out alone ‘to get some air’. It was the last time she saw him until undertaking the grim task of identifying his body on Friday the 2nd.

Faithful Elodie had been nowhere near Tiding Street, of course – Melia has no explanation for why the defendant would insist this to be the case or allege that she should want to drug her friend – but it was true that Melia did phone her at 02.30, when Kit failed to return from his walk. Elodie, coming to the end of her night’s partying, advised waiting till morning and they prayed jointly that poor Kit had not bumped into some bad influence from his old life and been tempted into a late-night bar (a glance in my direction as the words ‘bad influence’ are uttered).

As for the photograph of Kit and me, she knows nothing of it, whatever the defendant maliciously claims.

Who, then, captured this crucial evidence? This is put to a member of the investigation team and the court is told that the image was anonymously submitted by email. A subsequent police appeal for the mystery photographer to come forward has led to several claims, including a man in and out of local homeless shelters and known to the police as a rough sleeper.

‘Do rough sleepers have mobile phones?’ my barrister asks.

‘Everyone does,’ says the officer.

‘Mobile phones equipped with data to send material by email?’

‘Incredibly, it’s not out of the question.’

Is there not then a case for charging this man with failure to report a crime?

Without firm identification, no charge can be brought. In any case, at the time the photograph was taken, no crime had been committed. It may even have been snapped accidentally and only recognized as potentially significant following the news of Kit’s death. (He’s a good citizen, this homeless guy. Someone give him a medal.)

All of which leads nicely into a reiteration of the time of death: any time between immediately after the image was captured and three hours later.

*

Clare witnessed my duping, of course, but now she suggests I sought to dupe her. She accepts Melia’s explanation of Kit’s return, understanding on reflection that with Melia off work and the two women estranged over my betrayal, her only information about Kit’s disappearance came from me.

No, she did not personally witness the arrival of any police officer at her home on the morning of Monday 30 December.

Merchison must have waited for her to leave the house before coming straight to the door, ID in hand, to tick me off and secure my continuing faith in his investigation.

One of the worst moments of my life is when, challenged with my claim that she personally took a call from one of the detectives, Clare says it might in fact have been from me, disguising my voice. ‘I can’t say for sure it was him, but I can’t say for sure it wasn’t.’

Ask Gretchen and Steve, I want to scream, they had calls from the police, too!

But, when it is their turn, they say they were in fact phoned by Melia, not the police. It was a fatal assumption on my part. She concedes she didn’t think to text them to inform them that Kit had turned up and they both accept her explanation that she believed Kit had been in touch directly. They were his friends, after all, not hers.

Steve bears witness to my erratic behaviour in the days following Kit’s ‘disappearance’ – a hostile text accusing him of lying to the police; garbled theories about drugs deals and a trip to Marrakech. (So much for not snitching on a friend – but then standing in a witness box is different from propping up a bar, and he was always closer to Kit than to me.)

Gretchen, for her part, admits to her affair with him, but somehow it only serves to redress the balance in terms of Melia’s own infidelity.

Even that airhead Yoyo from the bar on the 23rd is invited to add her two pennies’ worth about me: ‘I found him very menacing.’

‘Towards Mr Roper?’

‘Yes, he said, “Fuck you, Kit”. It was like he hated him.’