‘A pair of relatives, not best friends, with no close bond,’ Waterhouse murmurs, looking down at his feet. ‘And the M.O.’s not Billy’s usual, either: poison instead of a gun. But the white books and the poem quotes in Marion’s and yours being from the same poem make it undeniable. This is Billy’s handiwork.’

‘Well, unless there are two of them,’ I suggest.

Waterhouse’s head jerks up as if someone’s yanked it with a rope. ‘Why d’you say that?’

‘I don’t know.’ I shrug. ‘Kind of neat, I suppose: a pair killing pairs. Maybe one’s targeting best friends and the other’s going for grandmothers and granddaughters.’ I mustn’t laugh at this. Really, really mustn’t. I’ll treat myself to a new car if I can hold out.

Thankfully, my hysteria subsides.

‘What put that into your head?’ Waterhouse demands. He’s almost shouting.

I sigh. There is no levity in this man. ‘Nothing,’ I say. ‘Ignore me. I was being silly. I’ve watched too many TV shows.’

He turns to Gibbs and says, ‘The interval between the planting of the book and the kill is shorter than it’s ever been: less than a week. That makes Kim, among the six recipients of white books, a real anomaly. Why’s she still alive?’

Charming.

‘We need to talk to her brother,’ says Gibbs.

I’m sure he doesn’t mean to imply that my ongoing existence is Drew’s fault. It only sounds that way.

I hated you then, Billy. The power of my loathing for you shocked me. I felt as if you were deliberately trying to take the story of me and my family – a story that mattered to me, perhaps too much – and turn it into a small, insignificant part of your bigger, more newsworthy drama. Marion and I had nothing to do with Linzi Birrell, Rhian Douglas, Angela McCabe and Josh Norbury. Yet suddenly we were all thrown together and defined solely by our relationship to you – your victims and prospective victims. Our fate seemed to have nothing to do with who we were or what we’d done.

How could someone plan to kill Marion and me? How could you, Billy, fail to see that I’d defined myself all my life as ‘Not Marion; against everything she stands for’ – so that if you wanted to murder her, I ought to have been the very last person on your list? How dare anyone kill Marion for any reason apart from as revenge for what she’d done to me?

Illogical and incoherent, I know; I’m simply trying to describe the chaos that was raging in my mind as I sat and listened to DCs Waterhouse and Gibbs talk about how they needed to speak to Drew, because I was such a disappointing, unreliable witness.