‘Ben?’
‘Yes.’
‘Who did he report this to?’
‘To me, actually. And I immediately went to Rottweiler… I mean, Harvey. Mr Forster.’
‘What did he say exactly?’
‘Mr Forster?’
‘No, Ben. To you.’
‘Exactly? You’d have to check the personnel records. You have those, don’t you?’
Dani avoided an eye-roll. ‘They’re on the way, I’m sure.’
‘Oh, right. Well, let me think. Now, don’t take this as verbatim, but it was along the lines of, did you know Alden is lying to us all? He’s not even who he says he is. Everything on his CV is a lie. He shouldn’t be here. Something like that, I think. It’s been a while, though it was quite a revelation.’
‘Ben said this? To you?’
Welter nodded. He looked even more nervous now than before.
‘Do you know what prompted that?’
‘What prompted it? As in, how did Ben know? Or why did he choose to tell us at that point?’
‘Isn’t that the same thing? He chose to tell you because he knew, surely.’
Welter looked really uneasy now. Like they were skirting around something and he wasn’t sure he was supposed to be talking about it or not.
‘Sorry,’ Dani said. ‘Let’s take a step back. Why do you think Ben chose to tell you?’
‘I thought… there’d been an incident.’
‘Between Ben and James?’
Welter nodded. ‘Over a girl. A woman, a woman.’
‘They had an argument?’
‘Yes.’
‘Who was the woman?’ Dani fished in her pocket, took out her phone and found the photo she’d taken of the picture of Liam and the blonde woman. ‘Her?’
‘I’ve never seen her before.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘Positive. But James was something of a ladies man. You know the type?’
‘Try me.’
‘OK, look, back in the day, I was younger back then—’
‘I think we all were.’
‘Believe it or not I was a bit of a party animal, at times—’
Dani didn’t believe it in the slightest, but she didn’t bother to say it.
‘—and we were a close-knit team. Friday nights in the pubs and clubs, sometimes during the week too if we had something to celebrate. James, he had more than one woman come out with him. Tina. Emma.’ He looked up as if racking his brain. ‘I think those were the names anyway. Maybe others. They came and went.’
‘And this was over the course of what? Ten, eleven months?’
‘I know, right? That’s the way he was. Except this one time, we were having a leaving party. He came alone that night. It was literally the following Monday that Ben came to me. I had to take what happened that night into consideration for the disciplinary, you see?’
Dani couldn’t care less about the disciplinary. ‘What happened?’
‘There was a bit of a… ruckus.’
‘Ben and James.’
‘Ben and James to start with. A few others got involved too. We all got turfed out of the bar… Gino’s or something. About ten of us.’
‘But what were they fighting about?’
‘You can’t just take my word for it, because I was drunk. We all were. And James denied it. Denied it strongly. But…’ He scratched his head and frowned as though he couldn’t quite recollect properly. ‘I saw it. I think. And Ben… we thought we’d lost him for the night, but he reappeared out of nowhere, all in a rage. Not at James, not to start with at least, but at her.’
‘Her?’
Welter looked really confused now. As though he couldn’t understand why Dani still didn’t get it.
‘They were all over each other. Her and James. Not just kissing, but I mean, really hands on. Up her skirt, over her bra. On the dancefloor. James and—’
Shit. Now Dani got it.
‘Gemma?’