“Oh no he didn’t,” said Holland, once he’d recovered. “He didn’t savage her nearly as often—I’ve actually compiled the statistics: I can prove it to you. And even when he did go for Paula, it wasn’t with quite the same loathing that he reserved only for me. With most of Damon’s attacks on people, there was a sort of affection about them that you could just about detect around the edges of his hostility, but not with me. He unequivocally hated me—and, as I say, I have no idea why. I mean, it can’t have been snobbery—yes, I grew up on a northern council estate and my parents were a drain on the state, but . . .”

Sellers waited for him to say, “. . . but I now have a drawing room.” Holland didn’t sound as if he had grown up on a northern council estate. Sellers came from exactly that background himself and had the accent to match, even after twenty years in the Culver Valley.

“No, I don’t think it was that,” Holland went on. “Damon was extremely right wing, but he wasn’t a social-class snob. He didn’t care where anyone came from. And, all right I’ve got a column in the Times and he’s stuck at the Herald, but he’d certainly have regarded that as a win for him, not me. He’d have cited the Herald’s huge readership in comparison with the Times’s, as if that were what mattered.”

Sellers kept his mouth shut, sipped his tea and wondered what did matter about a newspaper if not how many people read it. Perhaps that it should be read by the right people—was that what Holland was implying?

Listening to Holland eliminate reason after reason why Damon Blundy had chosen to persecute him, Sellers started to feel irritated. The focus of this conversation so far was all wrong. An alien beamed down from a spaceship into this room and told only that a policeman was here to investigate a terrible crime could be forgiven for thinking that Keiran Holland was the victim and Damon Blundy the perpetrator.

Rather than the other way around?

“Mr. Holland,” Sellers cut into the ongoing monologue, “I need to ask you some questions about Monday morning. That’s when Damon was killed. You’re not under any suspicion, and this is just a routine question, but . . .”

“Where was I? Walking. Thinking. I often go for long walks when I’ve got a piece to write. It clears my mind.”

“Where did you walk?”

Holland’s forehead creased as he considered the question. “Um . . . I can’t say I remember exactly. Around and about. On the common, around the streets. I tend to just amble about.”

“Where were you, Mrs. Holland?”

“Ms. Dennis,” Iona corrected him. “I was at my publisher’s offices. I’ll give you my editor’s email, if you like.”