‘I wouldn’t,’ Simon told her. ‘Anything you don’t have to be clear-sighted and intelligent in order to agree with is going to attract a lot of agreement. As a general principle.’

‘Spot on,’ said James Wing. Simon flinched. He could do without Wing’s endorsements.

‘Halliday’s writing about Billy all over the place and she’s winning people over,’ Wing went on. ‘I’ve also checked out her Twitter feed. Yesterday and the day before, the hashtag #FuckYouBillyDeadWomen was trending. She started that. People are lapping up her bullshit. Dunderheads, yes, but there are plenty of them. What I’m wondering is: is Halliday as obtuse as she seems, or does she have a particular reason for wanting to shove Josh Norbury’s murder to one side and direct us all to disregard it?’

Keen to expand on his clever-clogs theory, Wing turned to Kerensa Moore. ‘You said it yourself: in her various outpourings on the subject, Halliday’s made no attempt to explain why Josh Norbury was killed if Billy’s motivated by hatred of women.’

‘He was a gay man,’ said Neil Dunning.

Everyone stared at him.

‘Gay men aren’t women,’ Simon told him.

‘I know that. I just meant—’

‘He wasn’t camp, he wasn’t effeminate.’

‘I meant I can imagine a woman-hater who might also hate gay men,’ said Dunning.

‘You can imagine him, or you are him?’ Simon enjoyed asking. He noticed a small smile from Grace Woolston and his mood improved still further.

‘So now we’re playing Pin The Prejudice On The Serial Killer,’ Proust snapped. ‘Sandra Halliday’s made him a misogynist, and now Dunning’s made him a homophobe. Is it my turn? I’m going to say that he’s a terrible racist. All of his victims so far are white, aren’t they?’

‘Sondra Halliday might be deliberately creating a smokescreen,’ said Wing. ‘The desired victim – the only victim that matters – might be Josh Norbury, and the three women could have been murdered first to send us up the garden path. A false flag operation, if you like. Then along comes Halliday to interpret things in a way that casts Norbury aside as irrelevant. If we believe her take, we barely give him a thought. We consider only, or mainly, the three female victims.’

‘That sounds unlikely in the extreme,’ said Kerensa Moore. ‘Sorry, DC Wing. The first-three-victims-as-cover-for-the-fourth is ingeniously baroque, but sadly this is real life. And Halliday might see the world through a warped lens, but I don’t think she’s dumb. She knows the police won’t neglect to investigate Joshua Norbury’s murder on grounds of gender, or because of anything she wrote in Lifeworld.’

‘Have you read her blog?’ Wing asked.

Moore nodded. ‘I think I’ve read every word she’s published, for my sins.’

‘I think we all have by now,’ said Sam Kombothekra.

‘That’s three words, then,’ said Neil Dunning. ‘“I”, “hate” and “men”.’