‘She said enough.’ He put the glass down heavily, slopping red wine over his fingers. ‘Perhaps you don’t remember what she said about the Savoy Hotel. “Those big hotels don’t exactly light my fire.” Those were her exact words.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘You wouldn’t.’ I had never seen Ewan like this. He might have been unable to find a well of anger in Jordan Williams, but his own was spilling over, perhaps helped by all the wine he had consumed. ‘My life was ruined by a fire.’

‘Your production of Saint Joan!’ Suddenly I remembered.

‘Exactly. And you might as well know, she did the same thing in the review she wrote after the accident. There were plenty of newspaper stories, but none of the other critics actually sat down and reviewed the play. Why would they? It had already closed down. No audience was ever going to see it after the disaster on the opening night. But she couldn’t resist it, gloating about what had happened. Not, of course, that she made it obvious. It was just one little line buried in the rest of it. “Under Ewan Lloyd’s over-fussy direction, the play never caught fire.” You see? The same word!’

‘Do you have a copy of the review?’ Hawthorne asked.

‘No. I wouldn’t have that garbage in my house. You can find it online. Most of it was very sympathetic – or pretending to be. At the time nobody knew how badly Sonja Childs had been injured, so maybe that was why Harriet got away with it. In fact, she praised Sonja. “I’m sure everyone in the audience will be wishing her the speediest recovery and we can’t wait to see this talented actress back on the stage … ” But with every word she wrote, she blamed me. My ambition. My arrogance. My stupidity.

‘I thought about suing her. The theatre fully supported me. But at the time, I was torn to pieces. I had a young, beautiful actress in intensive care with third-degree burns. I’d destroyed her career. How could I have any right to worry about my reputation when I knew that, at the end of the day, it had happened because of me? To this day I don’t know what went wrong. Something short-circuited? A transformer overheated? Somehow a fake fire became a real fire and it was horrible, the worst day of my life – and Harriet Throsby made it worse still. I’ll never forgive her for that.

‘But I didn’t kill her.’ He had seen Hawthorne examining him and returned the stare. ‘I was in this house all morning. I took phone calls. I can give you the names of people who spoke to me.’

‘Did anyone see you?’

‘No. My wife was at the surgery. She’s a sports therapist. There was just me.’

‘So if it wasn’t you, who was it?’

‘I’ve told you. I don’t think it was anyone who was in the green room that night. Not Jordan. Not Sky or Tirian – they had no reason to kill her. She hadn’t said anything bad about either of them.’