Clover chuckled as Johnny sat back, appeased, in the chair. ‘Okay, so Tom Hanks and despots are no good to us, but pariahs . . .? Even villains love their mums.’

‘Hmm, right. So we’ve got . . . Roman Polanski. No.’ Matty pulled a face.

‘Why not?’ Johnny countered.

Matty looked back at him as though it was perfectly obvious. ‘He’s a rapist.’

Johnny sat up. ‘And as such, a pariah. But just playing devil’s advocate for a second, his wife and unborn child were brutally murdered. He’s a villain, yes, but also a victim.’

‘Villain and victim is interesting,’ Clover agreed.

‘But his story has been covered on every true crime episode ever,’ Matty countered. ‘He’s overexposed.’

‘That’s true too.’

Matty looked back at her list. ‘Geldof.’

‘Saint Bob?’ Clover queried.

‘Not taking anything away from Live Aid, clearly,’ Matty said quickly. ‘But it’s recognized now that well over half a million people were forcibly resettled in the south-west of Ethiopia; the spotlight on the famine enabled a military campaign to masquerade as a humanitarian effort. And it was paid for with western aid money.’

‘I never knew that,’ Johnny frowned.

‘His personal life too of course – the deaths of Paula and Michael Hutchence, his daughter Peaches . . . It’s really sad.’

Clover agreed. It was a life threaded with tragedies. ‘Will he talk, though? In the timeframe we’ve got? It might have to be a slow-burn. Make contact and proceed slowly.’

‘Okay. I’ll mark it as a possible going forwards.’ Matty checked her list and gave a small, startled laugh.

‘What?’

‘Ha! Right. Well, don’t laugh,’ she warned. ‘But . . . Kit Foley.’ She took in their flummoxed expressions. ‘Hey! This is the Don’t Bother list!’ she said defensively. ‘You asked me to read it to you, and clearly we wouldn’t bother with him.’

Clover rolled her eyes. If she never heard Kit Foley’s name again, it would still be too soon.

‘Well, he’s what we would call a very hostile witness,’ Johnny murmured. ‘I seem to recall that when you wrote asking to interview him for Pipe Dreams he got his big-shot lawyers to reply, threatening to sue for defamation?’

‘He did. And as I told them, it’s only defamation if it ain’t true.’ Clover smiled gratefully as Matty proudly clapped her; but for all the brave talk now, they’d been shaken at the time by the prospect of being sued by someone with pockets as deep as Kit Foley’s.

Matty gave a deep sigh. ‘Well, anyway, that was the last we heard from him until an email dropped into my inbox a couple of months ago, asking if we’d like to cover his – and I quote – “return to the international sporting landscape, following the fallout and tragic consequences of Cory Allbright’s accident”.’ She looked at them with a wry expression.

There was a stunned silence.