I rest my forehead against the wall. ‘What did Isobel say the next time you saw her, when you asked what the hell she’d been playing at?’

‘I didn’t ask.’

‘You …’ All my words have evaporated. What’s the point?

‘I didn’t want to embarrass her. She knew I’d seen her, therefore she knew I knew she was obsessed with my sex life, enough to follow me to your gig. It would have been as distasteful a conversation for me as for her, so I didn’t bother. I assumed she wouldn’t try it again, since she’d been caught.’

‘And you didn’t think I had any right to know? You didn’t fancy telling me so that we could discuss it just because it was interesting?’

‘I didn’t find it interesting. I didn’t realise you’d think there was anything to discuss.’

‘Liam, are you Billy Dead Mates? Have you murdered anybody, or helped to?’

‘No,’ he says in a monotone.

I turn cold. This man has been inside me, inside my body.

‘That’s the best you can do? An offhand “no”?’

‘It’s not any particular kind of “no”, it’s just “no”.’

‘It didn’t reassure me.’

‘I didn’t realise I was supposed to reassure you. I thought you wanted a simple answer to a simple question.’

‘I asked if you were a serial killer,’ I remind him. ‘Weren’t you offended? Upset that I might think you could kill people? Five of them?’

‘Not really. You might believe, as I do, that anyone’s capable of killing in certain circumstances. I didn’t take your question personally.’

Ignoring the warning voice in my mind, I say quickly, ‘Why the pairs? What do they mean? And why change from pairs of friends to a grandparent and grandchild? Why Linzi Birrell and Rhian Douglas, Angela McCabe and Joshua Norbury? What could you and Isobel possibly have against these people?’

‘If I were you, I’d stop tormenting yourself with questions,’ Liam says. ‘Other people’s reasons are always a mystery.’

No. Not good enough. I have to understand. I have to know.

‘Goodbye, Kim. We probably shouldn’t speak again.’

I hear a click, then nothing.

Monday, 19 January 2015

Nothing ever goes the way you want it to. I came here to find Charlie Zailer but the first person I see when I get out of my car is White Book Man: Niall Greeves.

He’s probably the kind of attractive that starts to look dull after a while, I try to persuade myself. Or sickly; too much, like eating a box of chocolates all at once.