I turned to Hawthorne for help. He glanced at me and shook his head a little sadly – but his attention was still fixed on Sky. ‘No one’s calling you anything,’ he said. He waited until she had calmed down. ‘Tell me what happened in the green room, when you all got together after the first performance.’

‘You mean … the party?’

‘I’m talking about the review.’

That shook her. ‘Yes. I wish I hadn’t mentioned it now. But Tirian snatched my phone before I could stop him and he showed it to everyone. I had no idea it was going to be so cruel,’ she added, defensively.

‘It certainly put a crimp in the evening,’ Hawthorne agreed.

‘But it didn’t have anything to do with Harriet being killed!’ Sky stared at Hawthorne. ‘Do you seriously think she was murdered because she didn’t like the play? That’s ridiculous. And I’m not going to be held responsible. If there was someone in the room who was crazy enough to kill her, they’d have killed her at the weekend when what she’d written was published in the newspaper, so telling everyone what she’d written wouldn’t have made any difference.’

Hawthorne wasn’t giving up. ‘We can’t be sure of that, Sky. It had been a long day. A lot of alcohol. A late night. Maybe you inadvertently triggered something. You saw what happened for yourself.’

Her phone pinged. She glanced at the screen and I could see that she wanted to pick it up and respond. She turned it face down.

‘Are you talking about Jordan?’ she asked. ‘Maybe you should be talking to him, not me. He’s the one with the temper. Fighting with Tirian. Him and his wife … always shouting at her down the phone. And what he did to me during rehearsals! Have you heard about that? You should have seen the bruises.’ She rubbed her arm, realising that she’d said too much. ‘But that thing with the knife was just stupid,’ she went on. ‘He wouldn’t kill anyone. He doesn’t have it in him. I quite like him, really. When he isn’t going on about his boring stagecraft or boasting about his career – American House of Horror and all the rest of it – he can be all right. He bought me flowers. And he wasn’t the only one who was upset that night. Harriet slagged Ewan off too and he was just as angry.’

‘He didn’t seem that upset to me,’ I remarked. I was still reeling from what she had said about the magazine. I thought back to the rehearsals in Dalston and the tech run-through here at the Vaudeville. I had absolutely no memory of handing her anything. ‘He made a joke about it. He didn’t seem to care about the review at all.’

‘You don’t know him,’ Sky said. ‘He never likes people to know what he’s thinking, but it’s all happening inside his head. He’s the complete opposite of Jordan.’

‘How well do you know Ewan Lloyd?’ Hawthorne cut in.