“Me,” Lindsay said. She expected that, like most people on the Clarion, Jimmy had always known she was gay, but he had seemed genuinely surprised about Alison. “I was young and daft, Jimmy,” she explained. “And she really knew how to put on the ritz. I was completely dazzled by her. But when I finally saw what she was really like, I had a hell of a job to get her claws out of me.”

“I wish I’d known that,” he replied. “I could have done with a few tips. That bitch wrecked my career. Damn near wrecked my marriage too. I put out the flags when I heard that she was dead, I can tell you.” He pulled a pipe out of his pocket and started poking viciously at it with a tool he took from another pocket. Lindsay couldn’t remember him having this particular mannerism, and wondered if he were using it to cover his nervousness at the way the conversation was going.

“It’s kind of like Kennedy, isn’t it? I bet anyone who had had a run-in with Alison could tell you exactly what they were doing when they heard the news of her death,” she probed.

“You’re not wrong,” Jimmy said, pushing tobacco into his pipe as if he were trying to suffocate it. “I was at home in my bed with the ’flu. I heard it on the local news at half-past ten. I tell you, it was the best cure I ever had. I felt like a new man, you know? While she was alive, there was always the threat hanging over me that she’d contact my wife and tell her the same poisonous lies she put round the office. Can you believe it? Me, a rapist? For God’s sake, she was bigger than me!”

“I suppose a lot of people breathed a sigh of relief when Jackie was arrested, though,” Lindsay said, refusing to be sidetracked by Jimmy’s indignation.

“How do you mean?” Jimmy asked, draining the last of his whisky. “Another pint?”

Lindsay nodded. “Well, if the police hadn’t got hold of Jackie so quickly, they’d have been picking over Alison’s past in all its gory details. Every poor sod like us who’d had anything to do with her would have been put under the microscope. There would have been a few ruined marriages after that.”

“You’re not kidding. I never thought of it like that. I suppose the police did me a favor, really.” He used several matches in a bid to light his pipe, realized he’d packed it too tightly, and started prodding the tobacco with a spent match in an attempt to loosen it.

“Especially since being in your bed with the ’flu isn’t much of an alibi,” Lindsay added jocularly. “Mind you, I suppose your wife was your alibi.”