‘This had better be good, Hawthorne.’

He turned his back on her.

‘The reason Harriet Throsby was killed had nothing to do with the play and nothing to do with Tony,’ he said. ‘The big mistake I made at the start was to believe that somebody had tried to frame him. His hair. His dagger. That made no sense at all. Worse than that, it twisted the whole crime out of shape. I should have listened to my instincts, which told me he was irrelevant. But it was only after I’d talked to all of you that I got the complete picture and realised what had happened.

‘Jordan Williams had said he wanted to murder Harriet Throsby. He’d shouted it out in front of everyone. So it made complete sense for the killer to frame him. But that’s what went wrong. Tony was a mistake.

‘Think what happened on the night of the party. Tony arrives, soaking wet, and Jordan hands him a towel.’

‘I dried my hair!’ I said.

‘Yes, mate, and at your age you’re losing some of it too. Later on, someone went into Jordan’s dressing room and picked a hair off his towel, thinking it was Jordan’s. But in fact they took yours. Simple as that.’

‘And they left it on the body!’

‘Yes. As for the knife, that was another mistake. Keith came down and took Jordan’s dagger and carried it over to the sink. Meanwhile, Tony had left his own dagger somewhere in plain sight and, once again, the killer took it, thinking it was Jordan’s. Of course, the killer was careful not to add his own fingerprints to the hilt and since nobody else had handled it from the moment Tony unwrapped it from the tissue paper – wiping it clean at the same time – only his own fingerprints appeared.

‘So the question we have to ask ourselves is not who would want to frame Tony, but who might have had it in for Jordan? And I think everyone here knows the answer to that.’

Suddenly, he was standing in front of Tirian.

‘I like you, Tirian,’ he said. ‘I sort of feel sorry for you. But I’ve got to tell you. I know everything.’

‘No. You can’t.’

‘I wish it could be otherwise, mate. But you can’t hide any more. I know.’

Tirian gazed at him for what felt a very long time. Then, to my astonishment, tears appeared in his eyes and when he spoke again he sounded almost like a child. ‘But I was so clever!’ he wailed. ‘I got it all right!’

‘That’s not quite true. You mucked up with the hair and the weapon, just for a start.’

‘Apart from that!’ The tears were flowing freely down his cheeks.

At once, Cara Grunshaw was on her feet. ‘Tirian Kirke killed Harriet Throsby?’ she exclaimed.

‘Well done, Cara! You got there in the end!’ Hawthorne smiled at her. ‘You just needed a bit of help.’

‘But why? Because she didn’t like the play?’