It should and often does mean nothing. And yet, still, it means everything.

“Where and when did you and Jane meet?” Gibbs asked.

“What does it matter? Somewhere, sometime.” Tasker sounded bored. Disappointed—as if he’d hoped for a more interesting question. “I was probably stoned. No, I was definitely stoned,” he corrected himself. “Though that’s something I’ve knocked on the head.”

“What, the cannabis?” Gibbs was surprised. “You’re not using anymore?”

Tasker looked annoyed. “You didn’t know? See, this just proves how mud sticks. I’ve blogged about it, I’ve done interviews, but once you’ve been written off in the public eye for doing a thing, or being a thing—no matter what that thing is, whether it’s weed smoker or pedophile—there’s never any possibility of rewriting. You’re branded for all eternity. Thanks to Damon Blundy, I’ll be known for the rest of my life as ‘Skunkweed addict Reuben Tasker.’”

“How do you feel about Blundy’s death?” Gibbs asked.

A faint smile appeared on Tasker’s face. “I feel—and I can’t tell you how sincerely I mean this—that I’m not going to worry about it unduly. Lots of people suffer horribly who don’t deserve it. I’m going to reserve my sympathy for those people.”

Gibbs had heard this sentiment expressed many times before. He could understand it, and imagine feeling that way himself, but from someone else it always sounded wrong. Was it really so hard to be sorry that someone had died violently, however much you disliked them?

“I suppose I should be grateful to Damon Blundy for one thing,” said Tasker. “If he hadn’t started writing about my drug habit, I doubt I’d have had the motivation to give up. All the attention made me paranoid. Suddenly, all over the bloody media, people were talking about whether I deserved to keep my award or not, given that I’d written my novel under the influence of illegal narcotics. It was insane. I had hate-mail on Facebook, and to the house—one woman whose son died of a heroin overdose wrote to tell me she’d burned all my books in her back garden. Mad!”

Gibbs waited.