Agent Gibbs came strolling into the room in an eerie silence. There was no click of the door as he entered, no sound of his footsteps as he approached, and no rustling of his clothes as he sat down on the table next to me, too close for comfort, and sipped coffee while turning pages in a small folder. From someone his length, and strength enough to flatten me with next to no effort, the quietness was unnerving.

I sat stiffly upright and looked straight ahead into the mirror, but I could study his face out of the corner of my eye. There were lines around his eyes and mouth, lines that told of hard years of fighting. Grey hair were cut short at the bottom, but longer on the top and fell loosely over his forehead. His jaw set in a somewhat grim manner. His eyebrows pulled slightly together, and although I could not see his eyes, I remembered the way his agents responded to his glare.

As the silence dragged on, I cursed the powers that worked together to make this man come here to ask me the truth. Would nothing ever go in my favour again? To someone else, I could maybe have explained. But not to him. To him, I could not tell a story that sounded like rubbish from the get-go, even if it was the truth. That I knew without a doubt.

After several seconds of silence, the agent pulled something from the folder, dropped it on the table, and pushed it in front of me. He did not speak, but leaned slightly forward, and waited.

It was a head-and-shoulders shot of that bastard Roy Miller, probably a driver's license photo. It smirked at me in a way that made me want to punch his face in all over again. And I am afraid it showed, for when I glanced up, agent Gibbs looked back at me with faint irony in his gaze.

He tilted his head slightly and pulled another picture from the folder, which he again dropped before me and waited for my reaction. This time it was a full body shot, and I recognized the setting. I had seen this very same image in my nightmares every night since that fateful evening. The body laid exactly as I remembered: upper body slumped against the wall and eyes staring unseeingly ahead. But the blood … I had left before that much has spilled.

An icy cold shiver ran up my spine, making my nostrils flare. I met the agent's eyes, just barely, and saw the question. What the question was, I wasn't exactly sure, but it was a question nevertheless, and I tried to formulate an answer. Something that would not give away anything, but that would take the blue eyes off me, even if just for a second, so that I could compose myself.

But nothing stood out as sensible from the jumble of thoughts in my mind, and so I settled for a question.

"What happened?"

He countered without hesitation.

"You tell me."

I shook my head, once, twice, and turned my face away. Away from the mirror, away from the picture, away from the unfailing gaze.

I stumbled over the words.

"I – I saw him last Tuesday. He was still alive then."

"When you arrived … or when you left?"

The accusation hang in the air, heavy, full of scorn.

My eyes jumped back to his, and our gaze locked. There was no give in him, no pity. He suspected me of a deed that disgusted him, and he was either going to force the truth out of me, or take me down hard. Or maybe both.

All the conviction of my soul sounded in my next sentence.

"I did not kill him, sir."

I knew it was not enough. It wasn't even enough to convince myself, certainly not the man sitting next to me. But it was all I was certain of in this whole bloody mess, and all I could say.

A dull throb started in my ears, and I barely heard the whispered question.

"Were you at his house last Tuesday?"

"No, sir -"

A sudden irritable movement of his head brought me to a stop, turned the tide of my thoughts.

"Yes. Yes, I was. I wanted to talk to him about – about his daughter. But nobody answered the door. I knocked; I called; I walked around the house and looked in at the window of his workroom. I couldn't see anybody. Not even Lisa. So I left."

"And the time was …?"

"I arrived around six, left about ten minutes after."

"And you never went inside."

"No, sir."

He threw his head back in a soundless, mocking little laugh that showed more clearly than any words ever could what utter rot he thought I was talking. And I was, mostly, but still I continued desperately.

"Believe me, sir. I cannot prove it very well, but maybe the boy next door could tell you when I left. He talked to me over the fence. And I got money from an ATM on my way home. Maybe it has a camera. You have to believe me, sir."

Somewhere, deep behind his eyes, something changed. There was a sudden stillness in his hands, a cool calculation in his eyes. Not positive, but searching, weighing, sorting.

"Boy next door?"

"Yes." It surprised me that that was the one thing he focused on. "The skinny one with the comb over."

He searched my face.

"There is no boy next door."

Something exploded in my brain, scattering thoughts far and wide. Of all the things I have doubted, the existence of the boy was not one of them.

Words tumbled from my mouth, confused.

"But there was one. I mean, I talked to him. He said my shirt looked like a piece of cow crap. I - I don't understand."

Blue eyes caught mine, intensely, as if he was trying to peer into my very soul. It was a horrible feeling, a kind of burning in my throat, and I couldn't stand it for long.

As I looked away, his hand dropped to the photos on the table. One by one he slipped them to the edge of the table top, picked them up, and placed them back into the folder. Then he move behind me, and I heard the soft 'trrrrt' sound as he unlocked the handcuffs. Blood came rushing back into my hands, and with it, pain.

Then he picked up his coffee cup and left, soundlessly, as he had come.