“I think that conclusion’s unavoidable,” Sam agreed. “She refused a lift home on the grounds that she had chores to do in town. Simon followed her out of the building once the interview was finished—she didn’t head for town. She ran—literally ran—out of town, in the direction of Bartholomew Gardens, where she lives. She couldn’t risk us turning up at her house at the same time as her. That wouldn’t have given her the chance to smash off her side mirror before we arrived to check.”

“You can stop,” said Proust. “You had me at ‘compulsive liar.’ Bring Nicki Clements in again. Put the fear of me into her. Find the connection between her and Blundy, and find out why she took a suspicious interest in Elmhirst Road on the day of his murder.”

“You said ‘compulsive liar,’ sir,” Gibbs pointed out.

“I have to praise Sergeant Kombothekra for something, Gibbs. No one can work effectively without positive reinforcement, or so I’m told.”

CHARLIE WAS WATCHING SIMON watching his phone. It lay on the red tablecloth between them, next to the breadbasket, and had yet to earn the attention it had been getting since the beginning of lunch. They were in the Little Lamp, a new and mostly underground café-cum-second-hand-bookshop on Spilling’s Market Square that Charlie had wanted to try for ages. Simon normally insisted on going to the Pocket and Pound, a dismal pub that he either loved for no good reason or pretended to love because he was a contrary bastard and no one else liked it at all. Today, he’d been too preoccupied by the Blundy case to argue, and Charlie had gotten her way.

Now, with scraps of other customers’ conversations echoing around her head, she wished she’d picked somewhere less eccentric that offered more privacy. It was an odd place, the Little Lamp. For a bookshop, it didn’t contain enough books. Charlie estimated that there were fewer than fifty. She’d seen two already that she thought she might want to buy—one a psychology book that she’d have to hide from Simon—but still, forty-six books was a long vacation for two people, surely, not a commercial proposition.