There’s a lot I simply can’t remember that happened in the following few days we were stranded in Rock Hill. My attention was almost entirely focused on my overwhelming sense of grief. I was completely disconnected from the many events swirling around me. I guess I was hoping that Crystal might still be alive and would magically appear from somewhere. And when it was established that Crystal had been murdered at almost exactly the time that Judy Dildo made her brief appearance at the Penitence Club, the only relief I had from my overwhelming anguish was the intense hatred I could direct towards her. As it was with other members of the band.

“We don’t know for sure, do we?” said Andrea, one of the few brave enough to defend Judy in her absence. “Just because we haven’t seen her since… since… Just because of that doesn’t prove anything, does it?”

“So, why isn’t she here then?” said Jane. “What’s that bitch hiding from us? I’m not saying she actually killed Crystal…”

“She couldn’t have done,” said Jenny Alpha. “We saw her at the club when it happened. Even Judy couldn’t have been in two places at the same time.”

“It can’t be a fucking coincidence that we’ve seen fuck all of the bitch since she burst in like that,” said Jacquie. “What did she know? Where did she fucking run off to? She knew something, didn’t she?”

“I don’t know what Judy did or didn’t know,” said Philippa, also striving to be diplomatic. “But you’re right, Jacquie. Judy took Crystal to a dark place she wouldn’t have gone to otherwise…”

“Fucking Thrash Metal male orgies,” I moaned. “Fucking men, smack, dicks, sadomasochism and knives.”

“We don’t know about any of that stuff,” said Philippa. “Except the knives, of course. And the fact that Crystal was raped and pissed on just before she was killed …” I burst into a fresh torrent of tears that prompted my sister to wrap her arms around my shoulders. “Well that’s what happened, isn’t it? It could be that Judy had nothing to do with it at all. Maybe Crystal just happened to be walking along the Catawba River and was the victim of a random act of violence. We just don’t know.”

But what we did know and got to know for sure when we filed into the crematorium to identify Crystal’s abused and battered body was that she was undeniably dead. The woman on the cold marble slab whose eyes were discreetly closed and whose skin had already taken on the pale complexion of the recently deceased could be none other than Crystal Passion: the love of my life and the woman to whom I had literally sacrificed everything. Except my life, of course. And I don’t know how many times I thought to myself (and maybe even wailed aloud to my sister and my two black lovers) that I would gladly sacrifice that as well if Crystal Passion were still alive.

That Crystal was unclothed in the crematorium, despite the cold, seemed appropriate. That was how she’d been most of her life and how she was when discovered at the scene of the crime by three young black men who were originally detained as suspects despite their exemplary academic record and good behaviour. This time, she was naked simply because that was what all corpses are before an autopsy and for a case like this where murder was pretty much obviously the cause an autopsy was a necessary part of the police investigation. The fact that Crystal’s beautiful body, already scarred and disfigured by the violence that had killed her, would soon be scalpeled apart only made me sob the louder while the police officers looked on and Andrea, Jane and Jacquie tried to comfort me.

But my grief overcame me. My feet suddenly gave way beneath me and, still wailing, I collapsed to the floor. I gripped Jane’s tee-shirt so tightly when I fell that I tore it across the seams, but fortunately not so that her bosom fell loose. I crouched on the floor in despair and shouted out to the world, just like you see people do in the kind of movies that I never usually watch: “Why? Why? Why did this have to happen?”

“Gee! She’s taking it bad, ain’t she?” remarked one of the brawnier police officers.

“She was Crystal’s closest friend,” said Philippa.

“She was Crystal’s lover,” the Harlot clarified.

“Well, whatever they felt for one another,” said the police officer sympathetically. “This gal certainly feels it strong. I don’t often see grief that bad. And I’ve seen some pretty crazed shit I can tell you. That Crystal Passion chick must have been one heck of a gal!”

The responsibility of positively identifying Crystal Passion’s body was only the first of a series of duties we all had to do, including Matt and Joe, and even Skull. And on this occasion the police were on our side. Whatever they might have privately thought about a dozen oddly dressed British women and their unorthodox lifestyles was expressed only inadvertently. This was a murder case and, for the moment, the chief suspect was Judy Dildo.

Her alibi was in no way helped by the fact that she hadn’t returned to the Paradise Hotel at all on the night following the gig nor on the following days. As a result, much of the police interrogation was focused on Judy and what we knew of her whereabouts in the few days we’d been in Rock Hill (and from before the time we’d crossed the South Carolina State Line). It didn’t occur to me that we should hide the fact of Judy’s acquisition of a quarter weight of dope and to the credit of the police, although they confiscated what was left for forensic testing, there was no mention that we were complicit in a criminal offense. Jane observed with a bitter laugh that when Judy Dildo did return she’d be busted whether she had anything to do with Crystal’s murder or not.

“That’ll fucking teach the bitch!” she said.

“That doesn’t seem fair,” said Tomiko. “If Judy had nothing to do with it, why should she be punished?”

I was so wrapped up in my own sorrow that I didn’t pay much attention to how the others were reacting to Crystal’s death. I suppose I assumed that I had the most cause for sorrow having always been Crystal’s primary lover in the band, but in fact everyone was grieving. Jane and Jacquie could sublimate their grief with their anger. My sister was distracted by my near nervous breakdown. But we were all in a state of shock and distress: Philippa, Thelma, Bertha, Olivia, the Harlot, Jenny Alpha and, most of all, Tomiko.

I suppose it was because I’d always thought of Tomiko as being somehow different from the rest of us that I never imagined she’d get so distraught. Tomiko was an ethnic Japanese woman with a Public School education and an Irish passport who managed the sound deck and was more often stoned than straight. But while we were in the crematorium she wept silently as she hovered over Crystal Passion’s body. She ran her fingers over the body, even over the knife wounds that had slit open the stomach, and then she unexpectedly exploded into a torrent of tears.

“It’s real!” she sobbed, as Olivia and the Harlot comforted her. “It’s really happened! I didn’t imagine it possible. Crystal’s dead. She’s dead. Dead! Dead!”

Polly Tarantella has somehow managed to obtain a transcript of the police investigation into Crystal’s murder and almost all of it is transcribed in her biography. There are exact details in the coroner’s report (which I couldn’t bear to read at the time) which describe the nature of the knife wounds, present an analysis of the semen found in her vagina and anus, itemises where she was hit and the likely cause of each bruise, and confirms that the urine traces over her body were fresh at the time of her murder. The fact there’d been no attempt to hide her body was evidence that the murderers weren’t professional criminals. And the evidence from the semen and the nature of the violence was that there’d been at least two and possibly as many as half a dozen men involved in the crime. But in the early 1990s when there was no such thing as DNA profiling and when America was drowning in a national crime wave, there was little likelihood the criminals would ever be found. Unless the forensic evidence exactly matched the other evidence the police had in their files (which were mostly written on paper rather than stored in a computer) or one of the perpetrators had left behind some tell-tale evidence (as so often happens in American cop shows) there was almost no chance that Crystal’s killers could be identified unless Judy was able to help the police with their inquiries.

Given that so much of the police investigation related to Judy Dildo, Polly has a lot of ammunition for her claim that Judy was Crystal’s evil nemesis. There’s a lot of redaction in the police files which as far as I could see was more to protect the witnesses (such as me) than to hide the truth. I can tell from the transcripts that it was Jane and Jacquie who had the most vicious things to say about Judy, though I was surprised to discover the extent to which some in the band continued to defend her. Though I don’t know for sure, I think Judy’s chief champions were Tomiko, Jenny and the Harlot. She was described in a much more positive way than I’d have predicted. I didn’t know before reading these accounts just how great Judy’s love for Crystal had been. Nor how much she’d admired me. And this makes me feel especially ashamed given how much I hated and despised Judy at the time.

Polly’s thesis of Judy’s great treachery needs more than a few unkind comments from Jane and Jacquie (and probably also from Philippa and Bertha), but the necessary proof, at least as far as Polly’s concerned, came to light on the third day of the police investigation

At this stage we’d got used to reading reports in the Rock Hill Herald and the other local newspapers from the Charlotte metropolitan area about the ‘English Rock Star Murder’ which on the local television news channels was also known as the ‘Crystal Passion Riverside Knifing’. There was nothing much more said about Crystal or the band in the reports beyond the facts that we came from London, England, and that we were all women (except for ‘local boy, Matt McGinnis’). There was no mention now of the controversy that had agitated the Christian faithful nor of the chequered history of our American tour. But the cliché of finding out about a story from a news bulletin rather than directly from the police (again so familiar from American cop shows) was true in our case.

“Breaking,” said the news reader on whatever local affiliate was associated with NBC. “We have new information about prime suspect Judith O’Hara in the Catawba River Killing. After the break.”

And so Andrea and I, holed together in our hotel room, had to endure an endless series of advertisements for local realtors, automobile sales and legal services until the news reader appeared on the screen again.

“The body of Judith O’Hara, the English rock guitarist the police have been looking for, has been found in Rock Hill less than a quarter mile from the scene of the horrific murder of English Rock Star, Crystal Passion. At this stage, we don’t yet know whether the cause is suicide or foul play, but we do know that Miss O’Hara’s dead body was found hanging from a tree by local walkers in River Park. We’re expecting a statement from the Rock Hill PD in the next half hour. Stay tuned.”

And following this there was a totally unrelated story about the preparation for the following year’s Come-See-Me Festival at the historic, award-winning Glencairn Garden, more on which I was in absolutely no mood to find out about.

“I don’t fancy waiting for this talking head to get round to what’s happened to Judy,” said Andrea. “We’ll get someone to drive us to the police station and get the story from source, shall we?”

My sister had clearly decided that whatever small benefit we might get from getting the news from the detectives investigating Crystal’s murder before the formal announcement would be worth our while because we’d be busy doing something instead of having to wait anxiously in a hotel room by the television screen for a spokesperson to loom into camera view.

“As long as we can keep the radio tuned to a news station while we drive there,” I said as I jumped up with a fresh sense of purpose. We then bundled into the Chevy with Jenny at the wheel and both Tomiko and Thelma for company.

“Hey, ladies,” said Nate, the receptionist at the Police Station who we’d got to know quite well during the last couple of days. “I was expecting to see some of you here after what what’s been found. I guess you wanna talk to the DI?”

“Is Luke here?” I asked.

“No,” Nate admitted. “He’s gotta make an official announcement for the TV cameras. It’s big news round here as I guess you ladies already know. But some of the other guys will fill you in. Wait here. I’ll see who I can find.”

It was Inspector Matthew Papadopoulos who escorted us into a quiet office that was reserved for just this kind of discussion to describe what had been found and what had been determined from the evidence. It was evident that he’d had to do something like this many times before. Even though it was Inspector Mark Evans who’d actually attended the scene of the crime and examined the evidence, Inspector Papadopoulos gave such a vivid depiction that it was difficult to believe that his was a second-hand account.

Judy had indeed been found hanging from a tree in River Park. The walkers who came across her body weren’t the first to walk past it, but they were the ones who’d noticed it first. The body was hanging just above head height and was obscured by dense foliage. In those days, there were very few cell phones, even in America, and none of these walkers owned one, so a couple of them remained by the scene of the crime (which must have been gruesome), while the other two raced off to a nearby drug store which was the nearest place where they could find a telephone. What they’d witnessed was exactly like those photographs that illustrate the Billy Holiday song Strange Fruit, only unlike those lynched bodies so indelibly associated with the Ku Klux Klan and the Gallant South, this corpse was of a woman of white ethnicity. At least she hadn’t also been found naked.

It wasn’t an easy job for the police to get Judy’s body down from the branch from which she’d been hung. Evidently, her murderers were quite expert at hanging people they didn’t like.

“They probably had to loop the rope from an elevated position,” Inspector Papadopoulos explained, “so we’re looking for evidence of snagged clothing. Our main task is to establish for sure that this wasn’t a suicide, although I can’t see how it could have been. In any case, we ain’t heard anything from you ladies to suggest that Miss O’Hara was the suicidal type. Suicides don’t normally involve as much cooperation and planning as went into Miss O’Hara’s killing.”

The evidence was that the hanging was what actually killed Judy but that this was only the final act of violence in a series of horrific abuses that she’d suffered. Inspector Papadopoulos didn’t give an account of the actual lynching, but I have a vivid image in my mind (derived from some of the more gory horror movies I’ve seen) of Judy’s body pulled taut at the neck with her tongue and eyes bulging out from asphyxiation while her last energetic kicks were only helping to hasten her death. And before that ordeal, she’d already been beaten, punched and raped. The inspector didn’t describe in detail how she’d been violated, but those interested in learning more can find all the repulsive details of the violence against Judy’s body described in Polly’s biography of Crystal Passion. There’s almost as much detail about Judy’s final suffering as there is regarding Crystal herself. The only compensation for Judy is that she hadn’t been stabbed to death, but I can only hazard a guess at how much terror Judy must have felt as her murderers slipped the noose around her neck and tugged the rope upwards.

The inspector went to great pains to explain to us (rather more than I’ve ever seen in a Crime Thriller) how cautious they had to be in arriving at conclusions about Judy’s murder. What was almost certain was that, as with Crystal Passion (who was consistently referred to as Miss Giordano), the death of Miss O’Hara was the result of homicide. What could not be determined were the motives for the murders, the identity of the perpetrators, the exact number of perpetrators, and certainly not their age, ethnicity or nationality: though the presence of semen in both cases strongly suggested that the murderers were all men and that there was more than one in both murders.

“One thing we cannot be absolutely certain about at this point of time,” stressed the inspector, “is that the two crimes are directly linked, although, like you and the crime reporters in the Rock Hill Herald, we’re darned sure they are.”

It would be satisfying to be able to say that the murderers (and rapists and woman-beaters and perverts) who’d killed Crystal and Judy have since been arrested and got their due deserts. And however much in principle I oppose such brutal means of capital punishment as lethal injection or the electric chair, I’m not sure my conscience is so resilient that I’d be upset if the murders were all lined up and electrocuted or, more likely, spent their last dying moments pumped up with pentobarbital, Pancuronium bromide and Potassium chloride. But the truth remains that whatever theories Polly and others have come up with, nobody knows to this day who killed Judy and Crystal, why they were murdered or even whether the two homicides are connected.

I suppose this is the point in my story I should come up with my own hypothesis: perhaps adding yet more to the frenzy of speculation about the murders and just what Judy knew. All I can say is that I’m pretty sure Judy had a good idea who Crystal’s killers were. She mightn’t have known them personally as such but well enough for her to be considered such a threat that relatively soon after (less than 48 hours according to forensic evidence) she was also murdered. There seems to have been a kind of crude ritual the murderers enacted when they murdered Judy, though I can’t say whether there was anything other than a frenzy of crazed and undoubtedly libidinous passion involved in Crystal’s murder. Nevertheless, Polly has no qualms in devoting nearly a quarter of the biography’s length to an account of all the hypotheses and rumours she can find, including those which are at best ludicrous and, at worst, dangerously unhinged.

Whatever else Judy had been doing in the couple of days since we last saw her at the Penitence Club I don’t believe she was trying to hide evidence of her guilt and thereby fell foul of a Rock Hill Mafia Boss. More likely is that Crystal’s murderers were on the periphery of whatever social scene she and Judy had got to know in the few days since we’d arrived in Rock Hill and that when she made enquiries (which must have taken on a grim urgency after she’d learned out about Crystal’s death) she was deemed to be a sufficient threat to the murderers that they decided to kill her as well.

And not simply kill her, of course.

And although we don’t know who Judy’s murderers are—just as we don’t know who killed Crystal Passion—I can say with no fear of ever being proven wrong that the men who killed them were the very worst kind of sick fucks.

There are those who almost seem to excuse rape, sexual violence and murder with the theory that the violators or killers were on drugs and didn’t know what they were doing. I know a bit about drugs: well, a lot more than those who make such claims. And even though I’m more an expert on E, acid and dope than I am on crystal meth, smack or crack cocaine, I just don’t think it makes sense to say that it’s only because they’re users that such people commit violent crime. The one drug I know that’s likely to turn people into crazed lunatics like that is alcohol. Smack and coke simply make it easier to do evil things if you’re already so inclined. And the drugs that do totally space you out also make you incapable of walking in a straight line or stringing a sentence together, let alone doing something as difficult as killing someone and getting away with it. If drugs were involved in the murder of my two friends, it was more because it added to the fun the fuckers got out of it rather than being the cause. Perhaps if there’d been no drugs (and we don’t even know there were) the killers might have been less brutal, but I guess they’d have compensated for that with greater clinical precision.

“I know that it’s all a bit much to take in, ladies,” said Inspector Papadopoulos. “Your friend Judy is dead, just as your friend Christine is. I’ll give you a half hour or so to gather your thoughts and perhaps pray for the departed if you should feel so disposed, but then we’ll have to ask you, as we will the others in your pop group, to positively identify the deceased and then to further assist us with our enquires by answering a few more questions related to Miss O’Hara.”

“And what would be the point of that?” asked Andrea.

“Of praying, ma’am?”

“Praying’s fine, inspector,” said Andrea. “I respect you for offering us the opportunity to pay our respects to the dead. No, I mean what’s the point of trying to resolve the case? What difference would it make?”

“So that we can arrest and punish the murderers of your friends,” said the inspector. “Surely that’s obvious.”

“It sure is,” said Tomiko, with almost malicious glee in her voice. “Whoever the bastards are, I want to see them in court and I want to see them locked up…”

“…Otherwise they’ll go ahead and rape and murder other women like Judy and Crystal,” said Jenny. “That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it Inspector?”

“Indeed it is,” said Inspector Papadopoulos with evident relief that he didn’t have to reply to Andrea’s objections.

Nonetheless, the fresh turn of events that followed the discovery of Judy’s body didn’t make it any easier for me or anyone else in the band. There was so much we now had to put in order before we could at last leave Rock Hill and return home. Not least of which were the funerals. And before that we had to assist the police in their investigations.

First, there was the grisly task of identifying Judy’s body which thankfully wasn’t as badly mutilated as Crystal’s. There were bruises and scratches clearly visible all over her face, torso and upper thighs. The neck was swollen and raw. The head was twisted at an excruciatingly unnatural angle. But there were none of the knife wounds that had scarred Crystal’s body. Although I’d known Judy very well over the past few years the shock of seeing her dead body didn’t distress me as much as it had to see Crystal’s. I still suspected that even though it wasn’t she who’d actually killed her, Judy was still in some sense responsible for Crystal’s murder.

There weren’t any of the distressing scenes that accompanied the viewing of Crystal’s body. No one collapsed onto the crematorium floor and no one burst into hysterical tears. Some of the band wept for Judy, but I wasn’t one of them and neither were Jane and Jacquie. But at least nobody said at the time (although like me some must have thought it) that if it hadn’t been for Judy then we’d have had no dead bodies to identify. And that instead of having to suffer all this distress we could have fulfilled the final commitments of our disastrous American tour and return by British Airways to London Heathrow and make a fresh start with the Crystal Passion Band still led by my eponymous lover.

It didn’t surprise me that the police found evidence of drugs in Judy’s blood and that we would be questioned about it. In addition to the traces of marijuana, MDMA and alcohol that you’d expect, there was also evidence of heroin and crystal meth. Nothing like this, of course, was found in Crystal’s blood. This didn’t endear me any more to the recently deceased, though like Polly I’ve speculated about the circumstances in which she took such narcotics.

“But it wasn’t drugs that killed her, was it?” Philippa asked for confirmation.

“Technically no,” said DI Luke Doctorow. “And unless we find further evidence, her drug taking is at best incidental to our investigations.”

“Could you do me a favour, inspector?” Philippa pressed him. “Please don’t tell Judy’s mother about the drugs. It’d kill her to know.”

I wondered what Philippa was implying. Were Judy’s parents that naïve about her drug use? Though I sometimes wondered what my parents thought about my own rather less excessive drug habits, I knew that I’d soon have the opportunity to find out more given that Mr and Mrs O’Hara were soon due to attend the funeral at the Joseph Armistead & Sons Funeral Home. Also flying across the Atlantic Ocean were Crystal’s father and brother, Giuseppe and Justin, and, although they needn’t have come, Zack and Liz Aaronson. And representing Crystal Passion’s British commercial concerns were our harassed manager, Madeleine Tartt, and Gospel Records owner, Nick Ó Domhnaill. Less welcome for me but inevitably, so too was Crystal’s husband, Mark McDonough. And from the other compass direction would be coming Crystal’s mother, Marianne.

Of all these mourners it was with Marianne, Zack and Liz that I most wanted to spend my time. At least, we could share our loss over a few joints. It was now my turn to comfort Marianne, which somehow served to make my own loss more tolerable. I avoided talking to Mark whose relationship with Crystal I was now more jealous about than ever: especially since he arrived with a girlfriend, Maria, who’d also had a relationship with Crystal and who I’d never known about before. The complications of Crystal’s promiscuous and undiscriminating love-life wasn’t something I really wanted to bother myself with at the time.

It was on the actual day of the funeral that I met Judy’s parents. Like the other mourners, they wisely chose not to stay at the Paradise Hotel, and they made no other effort to get to know the rest of us. This was understandable as Mr and Mrs O’Hara shared nothing with the band or any of its members other than their daughter. I’d got to know almost everyone in Crystal’s family and had once even had sex with Crystal when Mark was in the same room. (I’d like to take this opportunity to deny the suggestion that I had sex with him, but of this I can’t be absolutely sure.)

The only members of the band who spoke to Judy’s parents were Philippa, Olivia and Andrea. Mr and Mrs O’Hara were a world apart from Crystal’s bohemian hippy mother and father. Judy’s father was a middle-aged man with a prominent paunch, a head shaved to obscure his baldness and not at all comfortable in his Marks & Spencer suit and tie. Judy’s mother was tall and lean and smoked as often as she could when not in the funeral parlour. Like her husband, she wasn’t used to wearing what they deemed suitable clothes for a funeral (which was probably much the same outfit that they’d wear to a wedding, a christening or a degree ceremony).

“I thought after Judy had agreed to go to rehab, she’d be alright,” I overheard Mrs O’Hara say to Andrea. “We all did. She was so much better after. We didn’t mind the boyfriends and the late nights and all: it was all those hard drugs that were killing her we didn’t like.”

“We thought it’d be good for Judy to go on tour with you girls,” said Judy’s father. “That Crystal seemed like a nice girl. Really posh and polite, she was. Not like Judy’s scummy boyfriends. Bloody scumbags the lot of ’em, if you don’t mind my French.”

Mark, Marianne and Giuseppe paid for the funerals of both Judy and Crystal and also paid for Judy’s parents’ air-fare and hotel bills. I was dreading that they’d impose some sort of self-indulgent hippy nonsense on the funeral. Would there be a naturist theme to celebrate Crystal’s preferred style of dress? Would there be the scent of incense and patchouli oil everywhere? Would we be treated to a soundtrack of dreary 1960s singer-songwriters? Instead it was a remarkably restrained event or, indeed, pair of events, as both Crystal’s and Judy’s funerals took place on the same day and the combined funeral was a tribute to both women.

Judy’s parents requested hymns that were chosen more for their tunes than their lyrical content, but I wasn’t going to criticise them for choosing He Who Would Valiant Be or Jerusalem. There were even prayers and a moment of silence. This must have been a source of gratification for Judy’s parents just as much as it would have annoyed the living Judy. Reverend Emery Cleopas of the Rock Hill Episcopal Church must also have been pleased to discover that the band of English lesbian punk rock degenerates he’d been expecting were rather better behaved than the plethora of tattoos, unconventional hair-styles and unorthodox clothes (let alone our media reputation) might suggest.

Music was played at the funeral. That could scarcely be avoided in an event to mark the passing of two musicians. There were two tracks by Crystal Passion—Rambling Woman and Travelling Light—but there was also a rock song that Judy had recorded with one of her earlier groups, the Stone Rollers, called Reach Hither Your Hand. Tomiko seemed to enjoy the song but I hated it. Otherwise, the music was a peculiar mix of polyphonic liturgical songs played on CD by the likes of the Hilliard Ensemble and the Tallis Scholars in conjunction with some peculiar downbeat jazz.

Was this the kind of send-off that Crystal deserved? Or for that matter, Judy? Polly Tarantella is convinced that it wasn’t. That in some way, given her unquestionable eminence, this funeral was yet another humiliation piled onto Crystal Passion’s ultimately tragic American tour. She also deemed that it was worse than demeaning for Crystal’s funeral to be bundled together with Judy’s. That wasn’t how it seemed at the time. However much I’d have preferred it otherwise, the respective set of kin believed that a joint funeral for two women who’d worked, lived and died together (more or less) was entirely appropriate. And whatever Polly has to say, it wasn’t a cut-price, pauper’s funeral. I admit that it wasn’t a State Funeral attended by the great and good from the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame or by a line of mournful Grammy winners. Perhaps only this could satisfy Polly.

Given the circumstances, the funerals were well organised and well attended. The attendance was boosted by the presence of Matt, Joe, Skull, Professor Simon Kurrein and Veronica Wilson. And it certainly was no insult to have the service led by Reverend Emery Cleopas. Although nobody in the Giordano family was a regular churchgoer, Marianne had a soft spot for the Anglican community and its Episcopalian cousins. She believed it was better to have the service conducted by someone professionally qualified and, through the grace of the Most Reverend George Carey, he was automatically sympathetic to a group of mostly English people who were having to bury their dead in a foreign land.

Would it have been better to repatriate the bodies?

Well, whatever Polly thinks, this isn’t a cheap option. And anyway there’s now a corner of South Carolina where Judy and Crystal will forever be neighbours. Furthermore, Crystal’s grave is now almost equally as far apart from where her parents now live.

Rock Hill, SC, now benefits from having an extra source of tourist revenue in the form of visitors to the Forest Hills Cemetery which those inspired by the life and music of Crystal Passion can come and pay their respects. The good people of the fourth-largest city of the Charlotte metropolitan area have a claim to fame that would have been denied them if Crystal had been buried instead in a suburban London churchyard.

Would anyone outside of the Carolinas have ever heard of this otherwise unremarkable American city otherwise?