He nodded. ‘I suppose I did, yes.’ Looked up at her. ‘That’s what you wanted to hear, isn’t it?’

‘I wanted to meet Quizmaster.’

He opened his arms. ‘At your command.’

‘I also want to know why.’

‘Why?’ He framed his lips into an O. ‘How many reasons do you want? Her yah friends? Her pretensions? The way she kept teasing and picking fights, looking to break us up just so she could watch me crawling back?’

‘You could have walked away.’

‘But I loved her.’ When he laughed, it was as if acknowledging his own foolishness. ‘I kept telling her that, and you know what she told me back?’

‘What?’

‘That I wasn’t the only one.’

‘Ranald Marr?’

‘That old goat, yes. Since before she left school. And still at it, even when we were together!’ He stopped, swallowed. ‘Enough motivation for you, Siobhan?’

‘You vented your anger on Marr by disfiguring that toy soldier, and yet Flip … Flip you had to kill?’ She felt calm, almost numb. ‘That doesn’t seem quite fair to me.’

‘You wouldn’t understand.’

She looked at him. ‘But I think I do, David. You’re a coward, pure and simple. You say you didn’t know you were going to murder Flip that night – that’s a lie. You had it planned all along … and afterwards you were Mr Calm, speaking to her worried friends not much more than an hour after you’d killed her. You knew exactly what you were doing, David. You were Quizmaster.’ She paused. He was staring into the middle distance, soaking up every word. ‘Something I don’t understand … you sent Flip a message after she died?’

He smiled. ‘That day at her flat, while Rebus was watching me and you were working on her computer … he told me something, said I was the only suspect.’

‘You thought you’d try throwing us off the scent?’

‘It was just supposed to be that one message … but when you replied, I couldn’t resist. I was as hooked as you were, Siobhan. The game had us both.’ His eyes sparkled. ‘Isn’t that something?’

He seemed to expect an answer, so she nodded slowly. ‘Are you thinking of killing me, David?’

He shook his head briskly, irritated by the assumption. ‘You know the answer to that,’ he spat. ‘You wouldn’t have come otherwise.’ He walked over to a low headstone and rested against it. ‘Maybe none of it would have happened,’ he said, ‘without the Professor.’

Siobhan thought she must have misheard. ‘Which one?’

‘Donald Devlin. First time he saw me afterwards, he guessed I’d done it. That’s why he came up with that story, someone loitering outside. He was trying to protect me.’

‘Why would he do that, David?’ It felt strange using his name. She wanted to call him Quizmaster.

‘Because of everything we talked about … committing murder, getting away with it.’

‘Professor Devlin?’