‘You’re sure you won’t sit?’ the father asked Wylie, patting the space on the sofa.

‘I’m fine,’ she answered coolly.

The exchange had somehow broken the spell; David Costello didn’t look in the least bothered about the notebook.

‘Fire away,’ he told Rebus.

Rebus took aim and fired. ‘David, we’ve asked you about this Internet game we think Flip might have been playing …’

‘Yes.’

‘And you said you didn’t know anything about it, and didn’t go much for computer games and such-like.’

‘Yes.’

‘But now we hear that in your schooldays you were a bit of a whizz at dungeons and dragons.’

‘I remember that,’ Thomas Costello interrupted. ‘You and your pals, up there in your bedroom all day and all night.’ He looked at Rebus. ‘All night, Inspector, if you can believe that.’

‘I’ve heard of grown men doing the same thing,’ Rebus said. ‘A few hands of poker and a big enough pot …’

Costello conceded as much with a smile: one gambling man to another.

‘Who told you I was a “whizz”?’ David asked.

‘It just came up.’ Rebus shrugged.

‘Well, I wasn’t. The D and D craze lasted about a month.’

‘Flip played, too, when she was at school, did you know that?’

‘I’m not sure.’

‘She’d have told you though … I mean, the pair of you were into it.’

‘Not by the time we met. I don’t think the subject ever came up.’

Rebus stared into David Costello’s eyes. They were red-rimmed and bloodshot.

‘Then how would Flip’s friend Claire have got to hear of it?’

The young man snorted. ‘She told you? Claire the Cow?’

Thomas Costello tutted.

‘Well, she is,’ his son snapped back. ‘She was always trying to break us up, pretending she was “a friend”.’

‘She didn’t like you?’

David considered this. ‘I think it was more that she couldn’t bear to see Flip happy. When I told Flip, she just laughed in my face. She couldn’t see it. There was some history between her family and Claire’s, and I think Flip felt guilty. Claire was a real blind spot …’

‘Why didn’t you tell us this before?’

David looked at him and laughed. ‘Because Claire didn’t kill Flip.’

‘No?’

‘Christ, you’re not saying …’ He shook his head. ‘I mean, when I say Claire was vicious, it was just mind games with her … just words.’ He paused. ‘But then maybe that’s what the game was, too: is that what you’re thinking?’

‘We’re keeping an open mind,’ Rebus said.

‘Jesus, Davey,’ the father said, ‘if there’s anything you need to tell these officers, get it off your chest!’

‘It’s David!’ the young man spat. His father looked furious, but didn’t say anything. ‘I still don’t think it was Claire,’ David added, for Rebus’s benefit.

‘What about Flip’s mother?’ Rebus asked casually. ‘How did you get on with her?’

‘Fine.’

Rebus allowed the silence to linger, then repeated the word back at David, this time as a question.