The tea, to be fair, was delicious. As was the chocolate and beetroot cake. Still, Charlie was sceptical about Drink, Shop & Do. A comma and an ampersand in the name of a café? It was too fussy. Anyone who chose that name had to have something not quite right about them.

Charlie was more cynical and suspicious about everything these days. It was Liv’s fault. Charlie had come to the conclusion that there were two kinds of lies: the really bad, corrosive ones in which her sister specialised, and the harmless ones that Charlie preferred.

Like this meeting with Sondra Halliday. Strictly speaking, Charlie hadn’t lied to Simon; she’d told him she’d set up a meeting with Halliday, and that part was true. If Simon had chosen to assume that Charlie herself would be present at the meeting then that was his silly fault, and he ought to listen more precisely to what people said. In fact, the meeting Charlie had arranged – the one she assumed was currently in progress – was between Sondra Halliday and the Culver Valley Police officer that, as a strident radical feminist, Halliday simply had to meet as soon as possible, if only because the prospect was so hilarious each time Charlie thought about it: DC Colin Sellers, a man who regularly announced his intention to go out and pick up a woman – any woman – with the words ‘I need a new ride’, and who then did so without a morsel of shame, or consideration for Stacey, his wife of more than twenty years.

Sellers, despite being the least trustworthy of husbands, was too trusting of his friends and colleagues. When Charlie had told him Simon wanted him to try and make Sondra Halliday see reason, he’d accepted it without question. He hadn’t wondered why Charlie was the one asking when Simon saw him every day and could easily have made the request directly. Having prepared an answer, Charlie volunteered it anyway: ‘Look, Simon can’t ask you because he’s not supposed to be doing the tasking, is he? Sam is, which is a fat lot of good to anyone. Sam’s convinced himself that tiptoeing around Halliday’s bullshit is the only way to avoid being a vicious male brute. So … keep this to yourself, okay?’

Sellers wasn’t very good at keeping things to himself. Nobody was supposed to know, for example, that he’d recently joined a Weight Watchers group in order to meet potential new rides with ample cleavages, after a disappointing run of ‘double fried eggs’, as he charmingly called them, but somehow everyone at the nick did know. The consensus, with which Charlie concurred entirely, was that Sellers was jealous of his closest friend at work, Chris Gibbs, who’d been having an affair with Charlie’s sister Liv for several years, and, more recently, had been pretending to have split up with her.

Charlie couldn’t help looking at her sister’s cleavage, which was on display today as always. It was an all-outfits, all-weather cleavage.