Sellers opened his mouth to answer, but Iona spoke too quickly. “There are very few people who are wrong about everything,” she told Sellers, as if her husband weren’t there. “That was Keiran’s unique appeal from Damon Blundy’s point of view: that he was wrong about absolutely everything.”

“IT’S ON HER IGNORANT head, and no amount of denying’s going to change that,” the schoolgirl with the stubby blond plaits shouted at her two friends, who looked as if they were ready to agree with her whatever she said. Gibbs guessed they were around sixteen—but would students that old wear uniforms? At Gibbs’s school they hadn’t, but perhaps different rules applied in King’s Lynn, a town Gibbs had never visited before.

The girl who had spoken had obviously been crying; she’d also removed her tie and fastened it around her leg like a garter, with the ends trailing. Her shirt was unbuttoned, revealing the top of a red lacy bra. “She might not have meant it to happen, whatever, I don’t care! It’s still on her head. Like a big fucking fat . . . hat, man. I swear to God!” Much giggling from all three girls followed this conclusion.

They swept past Gibbs in exactly the way that, a few moments earlier, they’d swept past the square black trash can embedded in the pavement. Anything that wasn’t part of their all-consuming drama was invisible to them; Gibbs could remember girls in his class like that; they’d never looked in his direction either. He found himself wishing he’d known Liv as a teenager, that she’d been in his class at school. Stupid. What was the point of wishing that?

After the three girls came a few more clumps of uniformed bodies, all traipsing along unenthusiastically in the direction of the open gates to Gibbs’s left; their lunch hour was over and they had no choice but to return to their prison.

Keen to get away from the pupil procession, Gibbs crossed the wide main road again and tried Reuben Tasker’s doorbell for the fourth time. Still no answer. Gibbs had been certain someone was in—he could have sworn he’d heard movement from inside the first time he’d rung the bell—but he was starting to wonder if he’d imagined it. It seemed plausible that a man who had no landline or mobile phone, was addicted to cannabis and had failed to respond to six emails marked ‘urgent’ might ignore his own doorbell, but that didn’t make it impossible that Tasker was out. Weedheads who worked from home needed to visit their dealers, after all.