Gibbs walks over to the table again. He glances down at the book but doesn’t touch it. Instead, he takes one of the bunches of daffodils out of the vase, pulls the red elastic band off the stalks and winds it around his fingers. ‘How did you know Billy sends books like this to his victims before killing them?’

‘I got in from watching my grandmother die, switched on the telly and saw a detective talking about it on the news. I realised – belatedly, like an idiot – that the card I’d seen on the ward noticeboard probably wasn’t a card. How did I know? Because I’d seen one exactly like it before. Not just seen; been given. Which is why I’m kicking myself for not having spotted it straight away, but I was focused on hideous death at the time – that’s my excuse.’

‘You were given a small white book like this one?’

‘Yes.’

Gibbs does his daffodil thing again, this time with the second bunch. He removes the elastic band and stuffs it into his pocket. The other one’s still wound round the index and middle fingers of his right hand. I wonder if he has a red elastic band fetish. There’s more wrong with DC Christopher Gibbs than is observable by the human eye; I’d bet good money on it.

‘Chronological order might help us,’ I say, and launch into the story of my involvement with the little white books of Billy Dead Mates, starting with the stranger who handed one to me at a gig I did almost a year ago. As I speak, DC Gibbs’ pebbly eyes seem to stare harder and grow blacker and more intense with each new development. I can see how someone might rather confess to a murder they hadn’t committed than be on the receiving end of those eyes for a moment longer.

I tell him about Ward 10, Marion’s death.

He’s ready with a question when I finish, before I’ve had time to take a breath. ‘Where was this gig you did, where the man gave you the book?’

‘I told you: I don’t remember.’

‘You don’t remember? How can you not remember?’

‘I thought you might ask that, so I brought you this.’ I fish around in my bag and hand him a crumpled sheet of A4 paper.

He starts to read it aloud. ‘Shrewsbury, Theatre Seven, 2 February. Lowestoft, Marina, 3 February. King’s Lynn, Corn Exchange, 4 February—’

‘Can we fast forward through Skegness, Salford and Sheffield? At the risk of spoiling the reading experience for you, I end up, twenty-seven gigs later, at the Motorpoint Arena in Cardiff and that’s the end of my first 2014 tour.’

‘And at one of these gigs, this guy gave you a small white book very similar to that one’ – he points down at the table – ‘but you can’t tell me which?’