I thought Hawthorne had dismissed this when I had suggested it to him. But maybe he was just trying to needle Tirian. It worked. ‘That’s ridiculous!’ Tirian snapped. ‘She couldn’t have heard a word I was saying, and why would I care if she did? It was a private conversation. She wouldn’t have been allowed to write about it.’

‘And then there’s Ewan,’ Hawthorne went on. ‘He had a particular loathing for Harriet because of what she’d written about his production of Saint Joan.’

‘That was a long time ago,’ Ewan said.

‘Yes. But as you told us, she chose her words very carefully and she deliberately baited you when you met at the party. It was as if she was mocking you. “Those big hotels don’t exactly light my fire.” Given that you’re now in a relationship with the actress who suffered those injuries, it would hardly be surprising if you were goaded into taking revenge.’

‘Sonja and I have learned to live with what happened. Harriet meant nothing to me.’

‘So you say.’ Hawthorne sounded doubtful.

‘You’ve been talking for a long time, Hawthorne. Is this actually going anywhere?’ The interruption came from the stalls, of course, from Cara Grunshaw.

Hawthorne beamed down at her. ‘Don’t worry if you’re finding it hard to follow, Cara. I’ll go through it all again later.’ He turned back. ‘We all know where we are now,’ he concluded. ‘But before I can tell you who killed Harriet, we need to look at the other two deaths: Frank Heywood and Major Philip Alden. Both of those men were connected to Harriet, so you have to ask – did they in some way inform her murder all these years later?

‘Let’s start with Heywood, the drama critic who supposedly died of a heart attack after eating a dodgy lamb curry at a restaurant called the Jai Mahal. He was a close friend of Harriet’s and it may even be that they were having an affair. That’s what Adrian Wells, her editor, believed. He also told us, by the way, that she always got what she wanted, which I think we already knew, but it does make me ask – if she wanted to take over as drama critic, did she also want him dead?

‘I can’t be certain. This all happened years ago and there are no witnesses. The police never suspected foul play, but then why would they even have looked? Both Harriet and Frank were poisoned. The restaurant was well known for its dodgy cuisine. Anyway, Frank died of a heart attack.

‘But one thing we do know. Harriet chose the restaurant. Wells told us that when we met him. She knew it had a bad reputation, so why did she want to go there? And here’s something else to consider. When she was writing her first book, No Regrets, she managed to get close to the main suspect, a man called Dr Robert Thirkell who was eventually arrested for poisoning a series of old ladies using rat poison – active ingredient, arsenic. Is it too far-fetched to suppose that she might have got a couple of doses from him just in case she might need it one day?’