If any neighbour had glanced over the garden wall at this moment, they would have seen three sisters weeping with laughter over their mother’s corpse. It would warm the cockles, it really would. Although, perhaps not those of Detective Tyson, whose cockles remained decidedly, icily, cold.

‘So,’ he addressed Emerald, ‘just out of interest, where were you between the hours of four pm yesterday and one am this morning?’

‘I was on the beach for some of it,’ Emerald tittered. She sat down, suddenly winded from laughing. Amber collapsed onto one of the wrought-iron seats beside her.

‘Can any witnesses vouch for your whereabouts?’

Emerald let out another huge guffaw at the absurdity of it all. ‘Her husband.’ She hooked a thumb in Amber’s convulsing direction.

This comment caused Amber to instantly sober up. ‘Oh, really? Why?’

‘Scott came around. You hadn’t come home, apparently. And you weren’t answering your phone. He needed comforting. Alessandro was totally bladdered by then. So, Scott and I went for a walk on the beach.’

‘And just how much comfort did you provide?’ Amber asked, her perfect white teeth clenched. ‘Your usual full body pillow, I presume?’

Emerald shrugged, which prompted Amber to jump to her feet. ‘What happened? Answer me!’

‘Look, we snogged. That’s all. Don’t blame me. Ruby put the idea in my head.’

‘What? No, I didn’t!’ I protested.

‘You’re the one who said that Amber and I should swap husbands.’

‘Oh my god!’ screeched Amber. ‘You shame me for having a fling with Harry and then make out with my husband? Un-fucking-believable.’

‘It’s a very different scenario, Amber. You’re now into tits and clits, remember? With Leyla,’ Emerald replied. ‘Besides, nothing more happened. We were both off our trolleys by then.’

The detective was looking from one Ryan girl to another, as though at an unruly tennis match between McEnroe-type racquet-brats. With twitching fingers he cracked open the cellophane of a packet of cigarettes, which he was clearly trying to give up, then disappeared in a bloom of smoke. ‘Do you want to talk me through the details of this particular shit-show?’ he said.

I realised that I’d become strangely detached from my feelings of grief and shock – I felt no tears, no ache in my throat, no rage, just an odd calm. As the only trained reporter in the vicinity, I felt it incumbent upon me to summarise the situation for the confounded copper.