I asked a few more questions, and soon elicited the fact that he hadn’t seen Moira in the pub. Presumably she and Maggie had gone up to her room before he’d arrived. I decided to change to a more profitable line of questioning. “So, if you were a gambling man, who would you be putting money on?”

His eyes crinkled up in concentration for a moment, then he rattled off the odds: “2–1 Tamar, 3–1 Gloria and Kevin, 7–2 Jett, 4–1 Micky and 10–1 the girlfriend.”

I couldn’t help smiling. I hadn’t expected such a literal answer. “And what about you?”

Neil stroked his mustache. “Me? I’m the dark horse. An outsider in more ways than one. You’d have to put me down at 100–1. After all, I was the only one who had nothing to gain and everything to lose from her death.”

I was intrigued. On the face of it, what he said was plausible. But since my only experience of murder is in the pages of Agatha Christie, that made him number one suspect in my book. I said as much.

He roared with laughter, and got up to refill his mug. This time, the tot of whisky was noticeably smaller. “Sorry to disappoint you, Kate,” he remarked, “but I meant what I said. Moira was the best possible source for early material on Jett. I mean, we all know how showbiz biogs steer well clear of scandal. And Jett’s life has been well-documented. The only genuinely new angle I could hope for was finally lifting the lid on what happened between Jett and Moira all those years ago. I couldn’t get an on-the-record word out of anybody about the reasons for the partnership splitting up. Her arrival on the scene was a godsend. She was willing to talk, and we’d only just begun to get into it. So I had a vested interest in her being around to talk to me. Forget the doctrine of the ‘least likely person.’”

“OK. So you didn’t have a motive. But you obviously think the others did. Suppose you run them past me?” I flipped my bag open and on the pretext of getting my notebook out, I switched on my tape recorder. I’d meant to tape all my interviews, but finding a strategy to deal with Gloria had driven the thought from my mind.