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But Tuesday, with Duffy’s tireless lawyer, Don Bayne, cross-examining Wright for a fourth consecutive day, it emerged that in his Feb. 20, 2014 statement to the RCMP, Perrin said he’d arrived a few minutes early to Wright’s office that day to give him the heads-up that the call was going to be “really difficult.”

Duffy and Payne, according to Perrin, were once again resisting agreeing to the deal-in-the-works, with the senator for Prince Edward Island still imagining he might be able to convince the world that he’d done nothing wrong in claiming extra expenses for living in his long-time Kanata house, and that his actual “primary residence” was his cottage in P.E.I.

“He (Wright) said, ‘He will be repaying because it’s coming out of my pocket,’ ” Perrin told the RCMP.

“And I believe Ray Novak was in the room at the time. Ray heard this,” Perrin said, “and I remember looking at Ray to see his reaction.”

Novak, who isn’t expected to testify as a witness here, has publicly maintained he didn’t know Wright was paying for Duffy until much later and that he wasn’t actually on the call; given his closeness with the PM, it added a level of support to Harper’s claim that he also didn’t know, and that once he did, Wright was gone from the PMO.

Wright, for his part, told Bayne that “Ray was not on the call, though he may have dropped into the office.”

“Perrin will suggest that he was,” Bayne said.

“That’s just not true,” Wright replied firmly, adding that he’d wanted Novak on it, but it didn’t happen that way.