“Got it in one. If anything, his attacks on me escalated—on his blog, on Twitter. So I repeated the process: emailed him again, asked him to stop, again. He pretended not to have noticed that he hadn’t stopped. Made me present him with evidence. Then he summoned me to another meeting. This time, he decreed that it had to be on November 11 at eleven minutes past eleven A.M. It was part of a very weird attempt to humiliate me. Probably makes no sense to you, but . . . that’s what he was trying to do.”

Simon could see what she meant. It sounded plausible, therefore he didn’t like it; it played havoc with his theory that only lovers or prospective lovers would arrange to meet at that particular time.

“It entertained Damon to make me behave in a ridiculous way. I shouldn’t have turned up—I should have told him to stick it up his arse, and write whatever he liked. It’s a common definition of madness, isn’t it: doing the exact same thing and expecting it to have a different result? He told me that if I arrived at ten past eleven, or twelve minutes past, he’d get up and leave. If I wanted to speak to him, I had to be bang on time. Absurd!” Paula ruffled Fergus’s hair. “If only I’d met Fergus sooner. You wouldn’t have let me pander to Damon Blundy’s ego, would you, darling?”

“I’d have dealt with him,” said Fergus. “I’ve never known a man to behave in that way. I don’t know what he thought he was up to.”

If Paula and Blundy had been romantically or sexually involved, wouldn’t she be visibly upset and shaken? If they’d been enemies, as she claimed, wouldn’t she sound angrier when she described how he’d tormented her? Wouldn’t she gloat about his death? Simon found her unruffled good humor disturbing.

“So what happened at the second meeting?” he asked.

“Same as at the first. Damon was charming. He apologized for having broken his word last time, he promised again not to eviscerate me in his column—and it was all lies. He did it again and again and again. Until he died.” Paula looked down at her wedding and engagement rings. She adjusted them, twisting them around on her finger. “At least I wised up after the second time. I didn’t bother appealing to his compassionate side again—I’d worked out that he didn’t have one.”

“He was a brute,” said Fergus. “Wasn’t he, Loophole?”

Simon didn’t immediately realize that Fergus was talking to the larger of the two dogs, now awake, whose ear he was stroking. Loophole? Strange name for a pet. Still, at least it wasn’t Fergus’s pet name for Paula, as Simon had initially imagined. “Does anyone call you Riddy?” he asked her.