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.”

Gibbs reread the Intimate Links advert. He held it up. “The date on this is June 2010. You say Blundy replied and they started an affair—why wouldn’t Nicki start commenting on his columns immediately? Why wait till October the following year?”

“Again, I’m not sure, but . . . my guess is that for quite a long time, she didn’t know who he was. I think they emailed back and forth and, at first, didn’t know much about each other. You’d have to build up trust, wouldn’t you? Especially someone in the public eye like Damon Blundy.”

That made sense. “And she stopped commenting on his columns in February this year?” Gibbs asked.

Melissa nodded. “I suspect that’s when they broke up. She stopped mentioning him then too—until Tuesday, when she came around to tell me he’d been murdered, and asked me to lie for her.”