‘Linzi and Rhian Douglas went to primary school together in Poole,’ Dunning went on with a more severe expression to deter further heckling. ‘They became best friends there, and then when Linzi’s family moved to Combingham they kept in touch. Almost constantly. They were the kind of female best friends who said they loved each other all the time and sent texts with a dozen kisses at the end of them. Rhian also loved Harry Potter – though that wasn’t mentioned before, when we were discussing her.’

‘Sorry,’ said Grace Woolston.

‘Don’t apologise,’ Kerensa Moore told her. ‘That’s why we’re doing this. To see what strikes us as important and worth mentioning when we hear the same facts from different people.’

‘Linzi worked nights for an agency, cleaning – most recently at Combingham airport,’ Neil Dunning resumed his exposition. ‘She was killed on 19 September 2014 between three and six in the afternoon. When she was murdered, she’d presumably recently got up and dressed after being asleep for a few hours after her night shift. She was found dead fully dressed in blue jeans and a black and white New Look top.

‘It’s a pity there’s no one here from Combingham,’ said Kerensa Moore. ‘I know the Spilling team took over Linzi’s investigation once Joshua Norbury entered the picture, but it’d be nice to have Combingham’s input.’

‘The only reason they aren’t here is their own resentment,’ Simon told her. ‘Once we were given overall control, they wanted nothing to do with it. Two of their DCs were meant to be coming today. Guess what? One phoned in sick and the other had something more urgent come up.’

‘We don’t need them, today or ever,’ said Proust. ‘If a murder’s not gang-, drug-or race-hate-related, they don’t know where to start.’

‘I assume most of the crime they see is one of those three things?’ James Wing asked.

‘It is,’ said Sam. ‘Which is why, at first, they pursued the race angle. Linzi’s fiancé is Pakistani, and her ex-boyfriend, the one she left for Ahmed, was the worst kind of white: a member of the English Defence League. He lost his job a while back and took it out on Linzi, so she sensibly dumped him for the more promising Ahmed, who’s an accountant.’

‘Why the race angle and not the straightforward jealousy angle?’ Wing asked.

‘Combingham are race-hate-crime obsessed,’ said Simon. ‘Their hypothesis was white thug or thugs who weren’t about to take it lying down when one of their own – as they’d see Linzi – shacked up with a Pakistani man. Only problem was they had nothing to back that up, and no theories as to why Linzi found a small white hand-made book in her coat pocket two weeks before she died, containing nothing but one line of poetry distributed over the double-page spread at the centre of the book: ‘I measure every grief I meet.’