“You should send your CV in to the Daily Herald, sir,” Gibbs suggested. “Now that Blundy’s dead, they’ll be looking to fill their offensive-columnist gap.”

Proust looked irritated. Then he grinned. “That’s not a bad idea,” he said. “I wonder if I could notch up as many enemies as Blundy.”

“More, I reckon,” said Gibbs.

The Snowman’s smile remained in place. He turned to Sam. “I assume you’ll be looking at the comments beneath Blundy’s columns, the digital versions?”

“We’ve already started, sir. Any names that come up regularly are being noted, anyone who seems suspiciously keen or regular, anyone veering toward obsessive—whether they’re pro- or anti-Blundy. There’s stacks about him. And we’ll be doing more house-to-house as soon as—”

“Put the Silsford team on that,” Proust barked. “Waste of time! No one saw anything, end of story. No one looks at the world outside anymore. We’re all glued to our tiny screens. Did you speak to Karen Sanderson?”

An audible shudder filled the Snowman’s small glass-sided room. Every police officer in Spilling knew the name. A thirty-five-year-old chartered surveyor with a day-trader husband and no children, Sanderson was a good citizen of the obsessive kind who, for no reason that anyone could fathom, had taken it upon herself several years ago to crack down, personally, on drivers who parked unethically in disabled and mother-and-baby spaces. She’d been cracking down ever since and regularly turned up at the station to harangue the police about their apparent willingness to leave it all to her.

“Sanderson corroborates Nicki Clements’s story,” said Gibbs, who’d had the misfortune of interviewing her that morning. “At eight minutes past eleven, when the email containing the killer’s photo was sent, Sanderson was yelling at Nicki in the library parking lot for parking in the wrong place. She’s sure about the times—she noted it down in her little black book of sinful parking. For the duration of her row with Sanderson, Nicki didn’t touch her phone—Sanderson’s certain.”

“So whoever emailed Damon Blundy a photograph of his killer encased in a protective suit, brandishing a knife as if to stab him imminently . . . it wasn’t Nicki Clements,” said Proust.

“No,” Gibbs agreed.

“Yet Clements describes the woman she fought with in the library parking lot as an old-granny type. Did you ask Sanderson if she was in her granny costume at the time?”

“She told me she looked the same as she always does,” said Gibbs. “Trendy haircut, tarty crocodile boots. Nor was she helped to fight the good fight by any passing grannies. It was just her and Nicki Clements.”

“I think that’s what they call ‘a telling error,’ Detective. Nicki Clements was right about every detail of her parking-lot row apart from the description of her adversary. Why?”

“She’s lying,” said Gibbs.