‘I wouldn’t have called you all here if I didn’t,’ Hawthorne replied.

He hadn’t even started and Grunshaw and Mills were already looking bored.

‘If you’ll forgive me, Mr Hawthorne, why do we all have to be here?’ It was Tirian who was speaking. ‘It’s the weekend. We have two performances today. There are other places I’d rather be.’

‘I’m sorry to have spoiled your morning,’ Hawthorne said, not sounding sorry at all. ‘There are still a few questions that have to be answered by all of you. The funny thing about this murder is that it’s much more complicated than it needs to be. Someone knocked on the door at Palgrove Gardens and killed Mrs Throsby. I think it’s fair to say that every single one of you on this stage had a good reason to wish her dead.’

‘How dare you say that!’ Arthur Throsby remarked, although he didn’t sound particularly outraged. ‘Do you really think that Olivia or myself—’

‘Forget it, Dad!’ Olivia interrupted her father. ‘Of course we’re both suspects. We both hated her.’

‘But I wasn’t at home when it happened. I was at school.’

‘I’ve talked to your school,’ Hawthorne remarked. ‘You had no lesson from nine thirty to ten fifteen. You told us you had witnesses at the school, but in fact it would have been easy for you to leave. You had your bicycle. Ten minutes each way and two minutes to get rid of her …’

Arthur Throsby fell silent. ‘I didn’t touch her!’ he muttered.

Hawthorne was unmoved. ‘Any one of you could have done it,’ he continued. ‘And as it happens, none of you can fully account for your movements at the time she died. Easy enough to slip out of Starbucks without being noticed.’ That was Olivia. ‘You could have gone on a cigarette break.’

‘I don’t smoke,’ Olivia said.

Hawthorne ignored this. ‘Martin Longhurst has ninety minutes unaccounted for between leaving this theatre and arriving at his office. We don’t know where Jordan Williams was at that time.’

‘You didn’t ask me,’ Jordan protested.

‘You want me to ask you now?’

‘I was at home, in bed.’

‘I wish people wouldn’t tell so many lies. It does make my job very difficult.’ Hawthorne shook his head sadly. ‘But we’ll get to all that in a minute. The point is, the crime itself was very straightforward and, more than that, the killer was obvious from the start. He’d threatened Harriet on the night of the party and he’d made it clear that he thought she should be dead. He knew where she lived. He was seen on CCTV near her flat. He used a murder weapon that could only have belonged to him and he stupidly left his fingerprints on the hilt. He dropped a hair at the scene of the crime and he managed to get some cherry blossom, identical to the sort that grows in Palgrove Gardens, on his coat. Worse still, it turns out that Harriet may not have been the only theatre critic he’s killed.’