‘He didn’t have his motorbike?’ I asked.

‘He’d have been mad to get on that fancy bike of his after the amount you lot had had to drink. I cleared away the bottles! Sky had a cab waiting for her. Mr Lloyd called an Uber.’ Keith frowned. ‘I’m not sure if I saw you, Anthony. Maybe you slipped out while my back was turned!’ He said this as if I had done something wrong. ‘I didn’t see Jordan either, but I checked you’d both signed the book before I locked up. I spoke to Mr Yurdakul for quite a few minutes. He was the last to leave. He wasn’t at all happy.’

‘According to this, he was with his assistant, Maureen Bates,’ Hawthorne said.

‘Yes. She was with him. She was holding on to his arm. He didn’t look well.’

After one bad review? Wasn’t that a bit of an overreaction?

‘Can we get into the green room?’ Hawthorne asked.

Keith thought for a moment. ‘You can do what you like,’ he said. ‘It’s no skin off my nose. The police haven’t said anything more to me and we can’t keep it locked up for ever. It’s not as if anything happened there – and anyway, I cleared up after everyone left, so if there were any clues or whatever it is you’re looking for, I’d have got rid of them, I’m afraid.’

‘When you say you cleared up, what do you mean?’

‘Well, they’d had a cake. I put what was left of it in the fridge. I suppose it’s still there. I did the washing-up, which didn’t take a minute. Like I said, I cleared away the bottles. There was some sparkling wine, which I put on the side, and I threw away a couple of empties … whisky and vodka, I think. That was it.’

‘Did you find an ornamental knife? A dagger?’

‘You mean from the producer? They all got one … I know because when they were delivered, I had to take them in. There were five of them, stacked up in the office … first-night presents. And the answer to your question is yes. One of them was left behind in the green room. Someone had stuck it in the cake.’

That was Jordan Williams’s knife. I remembered him stabbing the cake after Sky had read the review. It was something I would never forget.

‘What did you do with it?’ Hawthorne asked.

‘I washed it and left it in the sink.’

‘Were there any other daggers in the room?’

‘There may have been. I didn’t really look.’ Keith frowned. He had suddenly remembered something. ‘And there was the broken glass!’ he exclaimed. ‘I cleaned that up too.’

‘What broken glass?’

‘I should have mentioned it to you earlier. You asked me if I’d seen anything unusual. But I didn’t see it exactly. I heard it.’ He paused. ‘It was twenty past twelve and I was just thinking of going downstairs to tell everyone it was time to get moving. They weren’t meant to be there after midnight. That was what we’d agreed and it wasn’t as if I was being paid extra to stay here. Anyway, that’s when I heard the sound of breaking glass – on the other side of those doors.’