Kirsty put on a fake sad face, lips turned down. ‘Sorry about Daniel,’ she said. ‘But you really shouldn’t have feelings for suspects.’

I froze. Kirsty laughed. ‘We’re perceptive too,’ she said. ‘Poor little DI Dalton. Did you like Daniel a lot? He wasn’t worth it. He was a rather pathetic creature.’

I looked into her cold eyes and shivered.

‘But you Normals aren’t as nice as you like to make out,’ Kirsty said. ‘Even sweet little Anna. She puts on a good show, but when we were young, she encouraged me to take Gary to the betting shop. She wanted him to go off the rails so she could get her hands on the business. That’s not terribly nice, is it?’

My mind drifted to Anna with her cupcakes and flapjacks, and I wondered if that was true. It didn’t matter now.

‘And they made it so easy for me,’ Kirsty said. ‘Daniel was always leaving his phone lying around in a crappily secured caravan. It was easy to break in and take it while he was at work.’

I’d thought it was weird the way that phone was turned on and off. And I could tell from the state of the door that someone had broken into Daniel’s caravan.

‘I turned the phone on to text Gary from the abattoir and then off again when it went home with me, and on again in the woods that night,’ Kirsty said. ‘I wasn’t sure how accurately you could track the thing, but no point being silly about it.’

Kirsty was right. I had hit the jackpot. She was happy to talk. But I believed her about not wanting to live like this. Most people wouldn’t follow through on that, but she would. There’d be no day in court on this one.

‘So you wore Daniel’s overalls and made sure you left fibres and one of Daniel’s hairs on Gary’s body?’ I said.

‘It’s so easy to research now isn’t it?’ she said. ‘On the internet. I bet you detectives hate that. I knew you’d check for fibres. And I gambled that if I put the overalls in the bin near Daniel’s caravan, and the phone back in his caravan, you’d find them. I couldn’t make Daniel look too stupid, but I thought I’d get away with that.’

I pictured Daniel’s face. His rock-balancing art. The man who’d spent his whole life making amends. Working in an abattoir, trying to make the last hours of the animals’ lives as bearable as possible. A very special man. I blinked. I didn’t want this monster to see that I was upset.

‘But you could have ended up going to prison.’ I said. ‘Why would you risk that to cover up for your father?’