Audrey looked as surprised as everyone else: she clearly thought the Sabres had followed through on their threats to kill her son. Jeremy had, like the Agatha Christie on the shelf, been hiding under a different name: Darius Crawford, the name he’d given himself as he acted out a bumbling local cop. His other alias, the one the media had given him, the Black Tongue, was the opposite of bumbling. He had chalked up five murders and one coerced suicide. Like I said, some of us are high achievers.

It’s not one of Knox’s rules, but you should never believe someone is dead until you’ve actually seen a body.

I addressed Jeremy directly now. The parlour show was over. ‘Green Boots had to be a local. It’s why you only showed the photo to our family, but kept it from everyone else, even Juliette, under the guise of preventing panic, because any local would have recognised him. All the staff are up here on the mountain for the season – they’ve been here for months. It might not be suspicious that there’s a new cop from town they hadn’t met, but they would recognise the sergeant immediately. That’s why you wanted him out of sight so quickly, locked away in the shed. And you took his coat, but you didn’t take his shoes: steel caps are a usual part of a policeman’s uniform, and the body was wearing them, but Erin stepped on your toe while chasing the truck, and it hurt, which means that you are not. You could have pretended to be anyone, really, but I think you wanted to be someone with the power to separate us. That’s also the reason you made the sergeant’s death such a public statement, so you could split Michael off. But you were nervous, too nervous, and every step you took that looked like legitimate police work – identifying the body, controlling panic – was instead to make sure your disguise held up. So, when a Cunningham asked, you showed us the photo. It looked like you were doing the right thing. You were really making sure we didn’t know the corpse’s true identity. That’s why you were nervous when we were around the body. I just thought you were squeamish.