The comment is posted by someone using the name of Kelly Doherty, the profile picture the same image we have all seen a hundred times of her in her first communion dress. I sit on the edge of my bed and read the message again, my head spinning.

I click on the profile, to see it doesn’t offer much information. There are no friends attached to it. Only two items are shared on the user’s timeline and one is a link to The Chronicle story about Jamesy. The second is a link to the fairly dry press release about the attack on Liam Doherty. The user has commented on that one with ‘Daddy needs to keep his mouth shut’ and a laughing face emoji.

I screenshot it, intending to contact DS King later. Then I click back to The Chronicle page and read the comment again, and the replies below it.

Some people are telling the poster they are sick. Some are laughing as if it’s all a great joke. Some warning that the cops will be able to find out who they are and will be rapping on their door before long. It isn’t long before I reach the inevitable comments stating that I’m a horrible person and a scumbag. I’m too big for my boots. I think I am somebody important. I give all journalists a bad name.

I see a second comment from ‘Kelly’, posted just twenty minutes ago.

Ingrid Devlin met with Jamesy Harte last week. Don’t believe her when she says she cares about the Doherty family. She was on that monster’s side. Anything to make a few quid in one of her trashy books. She’s a bitch.

There may not be people at my door with pitchforks and lanterns, but the social media equivalent is building strongly. I report the comments. Report the user. Part of me wants to call Ryan and tell him to lock comments on the Facebook page to stop this from going any further, but I know he will be loving it. I can imagine him laughing at the folk posting the GIFs of Michael Jackson eating popcorn, saying they’re ‘only here for the comments’.

All attention is good attention in Ryan Murray’s eyes and if the blame is landing on my doorstep and not directly at that of The Chronicle then all the better. I might have thought the same myself in the past. That it is all part of the game – if people are commenting, even if they are angry, then people are reading.

For a bleak minute or two I actually wonder if he has planted the comment himself. He is, after all, one of only a handful of people who know I met Jamesy and somehow, I don’t see DI Bradley or DS King as Internet trolls.