‘Shit. I shouldn’t have told you that.’ Charlie looks at me out of the corner of her eye. ‘If Simon knew I’d even tried … He’s not Liv’s greatest fan, but Gibbs is the closest thing he has to a best friend.’

‘I need to tell you something I haven’t told Gibbs or Simon,’ I say. ‘About the night the man gave me the white book.’

I don’t need to, though, do I? It’ll make no difference to anything. That means I must want to. I hadn’t planned to confess this part but now that I’ve started, I’d better see it through. ‘I told Gibbs that my husband Gabe was with me on the night that I was given the white book – that he came to my gig, then drove back home afterwards because he had an early start at work the next day.’

‘And it’s not true?’

‘True about work but not about the specially early start. If I’d wanted Gabe to stay over, he’d have stayed. I lied to him: told him I wasn’t staying overnight in that town, wherever it was. Sometimes I have a driver when I’m on tour: Dmitri. He often picks me up after a gig and drives me on to the next town. That’s what I told Gabe was happening that night. It’s why he drove home. Otherwise he’d have stayed with me at the Narrow Bed Hotel, got up at 5 or 6 a.m. and driven back to Rawndesley then.’

‘You didn’t want him with you overnight?’ says Charlie.

‘No.’ I take a deep breath. ‘Also in the audience that night was Liam Sturridge, the man I was seeing behind Gabe’s back.’

‘I see – and Liam was the one you wanted to take to the hotel?’

I nod. ‘By pure chance, Liam was in the area for a work away-day. He wanted to come along. I warned him Gabe would be there. Any normal man would have said, “No problem, I’ll stay away,” but Liam had already decided he and I would be having sex in my hotel that night.’

‘You remember Liam saying he was going to be in the area but not which area?’

‘I remember everything visually – the feel and the look of the hotel, our room, what we did that night, how I felt … but the town? No. Names of towns are pretty much interchangeable at this point in my touring career. There are some places on the list that I’m almost certain it wasn’t – though even there I’m not positive. And I had a policy of instant deletion when it came to emails and texts from Liam, so I’ve got no record of where it was.’

‘Hang on – surely Liam would remember where the two of you stayed in a hotel? He doesn’t spend every night in a different city, does he?’