‘I expected Liam to talk to me about what he’d seen me do in Canterbury, but he never did,’ Isobel says sadly. ‘I was too scared – well, more embarrassed, really – to bring it up, so I had no way of knowing what Kim meant to him, or if they were still together. I waited and waited, putting Kim and Marion off till last instead of having them as the first pair as I’d originally planned. I did the others, and didn’t mind waiting to finish. I wasn’t in a particular hurry. The opposite, really. It was motivating for me to think that there were still some outstanding. It buoyed me up. Without that …’ Isobel shakes her head as if it doesn’t bear thinking about.

Outstanding. The word makes my stomach turn over. Outstanding not as in excellent; as in still to be killed.

Funny peculiar, not funny ha-ha.

‘Then one day Liam told me his ex-girlfriend’s grandmother was dying. Well, he didn’t say exactly that. He asked me what I’d do if I knew someone whose grandmother was about to die of cancer. Would I send a card, and what would I write in it? I asked him who he meant, and he told me: Kim. He didn’t need to say her surname. There was only one: Famous Kim, Superstar Kim.’

‘For fuck’s sake,’ I mutter.

‘Liam called her his “ex”. I didn’t realise they’d split up. I managed to get the story out of him: Kim had rung him in a complete state, even though they were no longer seeing each other. Her grandmother was about to die and she …’ Isobel glances at me, then looks quickly away. ‘She didn’t think there was any way to make peace or resolve anything before Marion went. Liam didn’t want to get involved, but he was thinking about sending a card so that he could do the right thing, at least.’

Cheers for that, Liam. What a big-hearted sex robot you are.

‘I offered to buy the card and tell him what to write, but he decided in the end that he was better off not interfering. I think, having lost our mother so recently, he couldn’t bear to think about death long enough to do the whole card thing.’

That’s one thing Liam and I have in common, then: both allergic to the idea of death.

‘With regard to my … project, I knew that Kim was once again available to me since she was no longer my brother’s girlfriend,’ Isobel goes on. ‘I had to act fast. Marion Hopwood was dying, but she couldn’t just die. I had to kill her. I was upset that I couldn’t use my gun that I used for the others, but she was in hospital. People would have heard the shot.’