This paper proposes an assay of the discursive construction of evidence in an English police interview with a rape suspect. The analytic findings diverge from former inquiry on police–suspect interview discourse, in that here the interviewers actively lead an interviewee to generate defence evidence. The paper tries to make the following contributions: (i) it shows the interactional mechanisms via which the interviewers co-construct the interviewee’s own version of events, and points out the potential legal ramifications by centering on the construction of one key evidential aspect, to wit, consent; (ii) it lends weight to the hypothesis that interviewer agendas are strongly determinative of interview results in terms of the evidential account generated, while making the notable novel contribution of displaying that this is not simply a case of police interviewers being inevitably prosecution-focused; and (iii) it tries to engender further investigation into the significance of interviewer discursive influence in cases where consent is at issue, against a backdrop of raising numbers of rape cases being suspended by the police at this early stage of the criminal justice process.