I can think of other differences that Holland omits to mention. Sprinting requires a pair of sneakers and a can of Lucozade. Horror novels can manage without both. Sprinting involves moving fast. A book doesn’t necessarily have to move fast (read Reuben Tasker’s if you want proof). On the other hand, horror novels and Olympic sprinting have some features in common: both can make you sweaty, whether from fear or exertion. Both have a competitive aspect—there are sprinting prizes and book prizes. If illegal drugs are a bar to winning in one, why not in the other? After all, the cash prize goes to the law-breaking drug-taking writer, not to the book itself. Books do not have bank accounts. Keiran Holland has yet to offer a persuasive reason why Bryn Gilligan should be deprived of his medals while supernaturally stoned Reuben Tasker should get to hang on to his.

CHAPTER 6

Thursday, July 4, 2013

“NICKI CLEMENTS IS A liar,” Melissa Redgate told Gibbs. “She always has been.” Unlike me, you and all decent people was the clear implication.

Speak for yourself, thought Gibbs. Though, of course, Melissa hadn’t spoken the words out loud. Gibbs couldn’t prove—yet—that she was a self-satisfied moral-majority type. It was just a sense he had. He wasn’t enjoying being in a small interview room with her. What kind of person contacts detectives, unsolicited, and says, “You might want to suspect my best friend of murder, even though I have no proof”?

Nicki Clements hadn’t murdered Damon Blundy, unless she was far cleverer than she appeared to be. The secretary of Freeth Lane Primary School had endorsed her alibi: Nicki had been on the phone to the school, on her landline, on and off all morning. She wouldn’t have had time to drive to Elmhirst Road, kill a man and drive back home between phone calls.

Having heard Robbie Meakin’s account of his meeting with Nicki, Gibbs couldn’t help but pity the woman. She sounded more like a desperate idiot than an evil genius.

Melissa handed Gibbs a blue box file that she’d brought in with her. “There’s a printout of an advertisement in there that Nicki posted on a casual-sex website called Intimate Links. I’m fairly sure Damon Blundy answered and the two of them started having an affair.”

Gibbs flicked through the pages in the box. “There’s a lot more here than one advert. Are these . . . ?”

“A selection of Damon Blundy’s newspaper columns, plus comments sections. I printed them out to save you having to look them up on the Internet. And there are plenty more, if you’re interested. Those are just a random sample. Between October 2011 and February this year, Nicki commented on nearly all of Blundy’s columns—always sticking up for his point of view, however craven it was, and attacking other commenters for attacking him. Why would she do that if they weren’t having an affair? As far as I know, she’s never gone in for online commenting, before or since.”