Twenty hands shoot up into the coffee-thick air of the bookshop as we come to the Q&A.

‘How do you think she got out of the UK, Freddie?’ whines a Roseanne Barr-esque woman with purple hair, fifth row from the front.

‘I don’t know for sure,’ says Freds.

‘Neither do the cops!’ a Metallica-beard dude shouts from the back.

‘Well, quite,’ Freddie chuckles. ‘According to the police, the last phone signal that came through on her mobile bounced off a transmitter on the Western Esplanade in Southampton which suggests she left from Southampton Docks, doesn’t it? But there was no record of anyone called Rhiannon Lewis boarding a cruise ship at the terminal. She simply disappeared.’

‘Did she catch a ride on some smaller boat?’ suggests a small guy near me who had been watching videos of himself dicking about with his cat on Tik Tok before the gig had got going.

‘There were theories that she was hiding in Portugal or Spain with one of her dad’s cronies. There were sightings of her in Africa, Thailand, Buenos Aires as well but there was no telling what was true.’

Old Lady Chunky Blue Heels on the aisle shoots her bingo wing up. ‘What do you think made Rhianna murder in the first place, Mr Cheney?’

Rose West Fucking Wept – my name’s on the cover of the damn book she’s bought and she still can’t say it right.

‘Could be any manner of things,’ says Freddie. ‘We could speculate that it comes from the brain injury she suffered when she was six. Her father was a vigilante and she used to watch him at work in wild fascination for his violence – and this was from an early age, remember.’

Cue serious faces all round, one batting of eyelids and several lost little headshakes. Poor kid, poor poor Rhianna.

‘Studies have shown that children with weak or dispassionate relationships with their mothers often lapse into patterns of violent crime—’

He’s talking like a criminology YouTuber. I’m briefly impressed.

‘—or you could surmise that she was just a bad seed.’

‘Amen,’ says Old Lady Chunky Blue Heels.

A woman with a beaky nose and Pot Noodle perm gets the roving mic. ‘Did you get to interview her sister? Do you know how she feels about it all?’

‘No, she wouldn’t talk to me,’ says Freddie. ‘She wanted no part in this story. Which is ironic when you consider her role in it.’

Another Texan throwback pipes up. ‘I read that most serial killers don’t just stop killing – that there may be a cooling-off period but that they never stop because it is a predilection which cannot ever be curbed or rehabilitated. Now what I want to know and what you might be able to tell me, sir—’

There’s always one. It’s as certain as the scrawny autistic kid will win Countdown – the guy who takes as long as he pleases to ask a question.