“I went back to my room and had a shower. Then I went down to the rehearsal room. That must have been some time between half-eleven and midnight. Moira and I had planned to do a couple of hours’ work on a couple of new songs, but we weren’t meeting till half past one.”

I said nothing for a moment, concentrating on the road junction ahead. The traffic comes down that main A56 like it was a German autobahn and speed limits hadn’t been invented. I spotted a gap in the cars and went for it. Thank God for the Nova’s acceleration. It took Jett by surprise, I noticed. He was thrust back into his tightfitting sports seat with a look of serious discomfort on his face.

“Isn’t that a bit late to start work?” I asked.

Jett relaxed as my speed levelled out and the G-forces disappeared. His smile this time seemed genuine, though I couldn’t see into his eyes. I adjusted the rear-view mirror slightly so I could see his face. “We always did our best work in the early hours,” he told me. “Sometimes we’d still be tossing lyrics and tunes around at dawn. In the early days, we used to drive off to a greasy spoon around five in the morning and have bacon butties and tea to celebrate our new songs.”

“So why did you go off to the rehearsal room so much earlier than you’d arranged?”

“I’d had a tune going round my head for a couple of hours, and I wanted to fiddle around with it a bit before Moira arrived. So I’d have something new to show to her, I guess. I tinkered with it for a while, then I decided to fix myself a sandwich, so I went off to the kitchen. That must have been just before one, because the news came on the radio while I was eating.” His speech had become noticeably more jerky as he got closer to the discovery of the body, his shoulders tense and hunched.

I slowed for the roundabout but still managed to hit the motorway slip road at fifty-five. This time, Jett made it to the grab handle in plenty of time.

“Did you see anyone at all?”

“No. But then I probably wouldn’t have noticed anyone unless they’d actually spoken to me. My head was full of music, I wasn’t paying attention much to anything else. I don’t know how to explain it to someone who’s not a musician. I don’t even remember what was on the radio. They could’ve announced World War Three and I wouldn’t have taken it in.”