‘I wouldn’t.’ Olivia glared at him. ‘There’s a great big whopping connection between Martha Wyers and your case, or whoever’s case it is. Are you helping the London police or are they helping you?’

‘That’s none of your business,’ Charlie told her. She hadn’t forgiven her sister for yesterday. I’m sorry, Char. It’s bad news. Charlie had imagined Simon half dead, held hostage by a psychopath, until Olivia had abandoned the grief-stricken act and passed on his message. She hadn’t forgiven Simon, come to think of it, for leaving the message with Olivia rather than telling her himself. Charlie knew why he’d done it. He’d thought she’d be angry with him for dragging her into it, or that she’d taunt him for being careless and getting caught out.

That the two of them weren’t wanted back at work for as long as they were of interest to Dunning and Milward was no more than an inconvenience that would, in time, be rectified. Charlie wasn’t worried about her job, and no one at work wanted to lose Simon, not even the people who disliked him personally. Not even the Chief Super and the Chief Constable, neither of whom could stand the sight of him.

‘Tell us what you think we need to know,’ he said grudgingly to Olivia.

‘Thank you. Well, firstly, even though I didn’t manage to find anything about Martha Wyers’ death, I’d bet a million pounds that she committed suicide. She wasn’t murdered.’

‘That’s the equivalent of a less extravagant person betting a fiver,’ Charlie pointed out.

‘A billion, then. She published one book—a novel. I looked it up on Amazon. It’s about a woman who falls passionately in love with a man she hardly knows, and it ends up wrecking her life. The blurb on Amazon even contains the word “suicidal”.’

‘For fuck’s sake!’ said Simon. ‘Half the novels that have ever been written are about that. That’s the plot of Anna Karenina. Tolstoy didn’t commit suicide. Charlie, we’re wasting time here.’

‘Listen, will you?’ Olivia snapped. ‘When I told Senga McAllister at The Times that Martha Wyers was dead, the first thing she asked me was if she’d killed herself. In 1999, while Senga was still a jobbing arts reporter, she wrote a feature called Future Famous Five, a profile of five arty types that readers ought to look out for in the new millennium: stars of the future, that sort of thing.’ Olivia paused to draw breath.

‘Martha Wyers was the author they chose. Senga chose her personally. She hadn’t read the novel at that point, but she’d read a few of her short stories and thought she was easily the most brilliant new writer she’d come across for years.’