Body Line

FIFTEEN

Artful Dodgers

‘He didn’t,’ Helen said. ‘He visited from time to time, but I think that was just to see Sir Bernard Webber – socially, I mean. They were old friends.’

‘So where did he work?’ Slider asked, careful not to make it sound important.

‘When I first saw him, I thought he was a consultant at another hospital.’

‘When was that?’

‘That would be – about seven years ago. In the spring of ’03. I’d just gone to Cloisterwood from the Royal Free. It had been open about two years then. I wanted to get into plastics, but there were never very many openings in the National Health, so I thought I’d make the switch to private.’ She poured tea. ‘Do you take sugar?’

‘No, thanks. Neither of us.’

‘Well, that makes it easy. No, don’t get up. I can manage.’ She brought the three mugs over and sat down at the end of the table, between them.

‘So you were on the plastics side at Cloisterwood,’ Slider said, to get her going again.

‘Yes.’

‘And how did you meet David Rogers?’

‘I bumped into him. Literally. I was going in the staff entrance as he was coming out and he cannoned into me, nearly knocked me over. I banged my funny-bone on the door frame, so I was hopping about in agony, but you couldn’t want to be bumped into by a nicer person. He was so charming and apologetic, you’d think he’d broken my leg at least.’ She looked up sharply. ‘It wasn’t phony. I was never much to look at, not like some of the glamour-pusses on the wards, but I’ve had my share of pick-up lines. Men always think nurses are easy. And I know a bad hat when I see one. David wasn’t like that. He was just genuinely a nice man. He was really sorry for barging into me – and believe me, most consultants would have knocked you to the ground without thinking twice about it. And while he was making sure I was all right, we looked at each other and something just clicked.’ Her face softened as she remembered it, and for a moment she looked almost beautiful. ‘He asked if he could buy me a coffee to settle my nerves. I said I was just going on duty, and he said could he see me later, then. So we made a date. And it started from there.’

‘He told you he was a consultant?’

‘No, he didn’t actually say so. But when we met later and I said I was on plastics, he said that was his specialty, and we talked about it, and it was obvious that he really knew his stuff. He told me about his training, and it was sort of implied he was still a consultant.’

‘So you didn’t ask him where he was working?’

‘Not then. We had plenty of other things to talk about. I just assumed he was still at the hospital where he trained.’ Again the sharp look. ‘I know what you’re thinking, but he wasn’t trying to con me. Later, when it got serious between us, he told me all about it.’

‘All about—?’

‘About that woman. Mrs Lescroit.’ She took a fortifying sip of tea, and went on, staring past them out of the French windows into the sunny garden. ‘We’d been seeing each other about a year, not very regularly, but whenever he could manage it. He didn’t come often to Cloisterwood, and when he did, I didn’t usually see him, except at a distance. When we met it was always away from there. Nurses aren’t supposed to go out with doctors so we had to keep it secret. It suited me, anyway. The other girls would have made my life hell if they knew anything was going on between me and him. Anyway, this particular time, we’d been away for the weekend – the first time we’d done that. We came here, as it happens,’ she said, with the closest she’d come yet to a smile.

‘To Southwold?’

She nodded. ‘Got a room at The Swan. I thought it was lovely – I’d have expected Brighton. But David always liked quality. We had a lovely time. It was June, and the weather was perfect. The sea was a bit cold but I didn’t mind that. We had lovely meals, and long walks. We talked and talked – he told me all about his childhood, and how happy he’d been, and how wonderful his parents were. He didn’t come from a rich home, you know.’

‘I know.’

‘I think that was one of the things that made a bond between us, that our backgrounds were so similar. We both got where we were though our own efforts, not because we had money or knew people. Anyway, that weekend was just wonderful, and then on Sunday morning when we were lying in bed he said he had something he must tell me.’ Her expression wavered, remembering the moment.

‘You thought it was something alarming?’

‘I thought he was going to tell me he was married, to be truthful,’ she said. ‘I’m ashamed now to remember I thought that, because he was always straight with me. The things he didn’t tell me to start with didn’t affect me, you see. But now he said he was falling in love with me, and he wanted to get everything out in the open. And he told me about that woman accusing him of messing with her.’ She looked at them, first Atherton, then Slider, a direct and clear look. ‘He didn’t do it, you know. It was all a mistake. The woman was confused, sedated and muzzy. I’ve seen people in that state, coming out of anaesthetics. They have images in their brains and in the half-conscious state they think they’re real. David said he didn’t do it and I believed him. But if it had gone any further it would have ruined him, even if he was proved innocent. People always remember. They say “there’s no smoke without fire”, and things like that. So the way it went was the best he could hope for. She dropped the charges in exchange for a big payout, and Sir Bernard pulled various strings so David wasn’t struck off. But he couldn’t practise any more.’

‘Yes, we were told about that. He wasn’t allowed to work with patients.’

‘That’s right. Well, Sir Bernard – or I think it was only Mr Webber then – got him a medical PR job.’

‘And that’s what he was doing when you met him?’

‘That’s what I thought,’ she said, and looked unhappily at her hands. ‘I wish it had been, because everything would have been all right, if only he’d stuck with that. But I didn’t know anything about it then. And soon after that weekend things started to fall apart and I had my own problems to think about.’

‘Tell me what happened,’ Slider said.

She drank some more tea, and went on: ‘After David told me about the trouble he’d been in – well, I loved him more than ever, if you want to know. It seemed to me he’d been the real victim, and that he’d behaved the best of everyone. He was so relieved that I’d taken it all right. When he told me, he said, “I suppose you won’t want to see me any more.” When I told him how I felt, he hugged me so hard I thought he’d break something. For a couple of weeks we were very close, and I had a feeling he was going to ask me to marry him. And then it all blew up at work. I was called before the disciplinary committee for stealing drugs.’

‘Surely not!’ Slider said, and it wasn’t just lip-service. He couldn’t imagine this plain, transparent woman doing anything like that.

‘Of course not,’ she said bitterly. ‘They found some of the drugs in my locker on a random search. I didn’t put them there, but I could never prove it. Those lockers were child’s play to break into. Either someone was trying to save their own skin by framing me, or someone wanted rid of me specifically – though I’ve no idea who. I wasn’t really friendly with anyone but I didn’t think I had any enemies, either. Well, I protested my innocence, but it didn’t do me any good. I was sacked. But Sir Bernard intervened and said he wasn’t satisfied that I really was the culprit. He said I still had to go, but nothing would be put on my record, and he’d get me another job. As long as no other evidence against me came up, he wouldn’t tell. And he recommended I sever links with everyone at Cloisterwood. Well, that wasn’t hard to do. I never really liked any of them. And one of them at least obviously had it in for me.’

‘Did you ever find out who the culprit was?’

‘No. I can’t even guess. It could have been anyone. But anyway, that’s how I left the Cloisterwood – and I wasn’t all that sorry, if truth be told, because it was really the reconstructive side of plastics I was interested in, and at Cloisterwood it was all rhinoplasty and breast enhancement and ear tucks, silly rich women fiddling about with their bodies because they’d got nothing better to think about. It made me sick. You should make the best of what God gave you, in my opinion.’

‘So where did you go?’ Atherton asked.

‘I went home to my mum at first, while I waited to hear about the new job. It was a dreadful time. I was miserable and angry – there’s nothing worse than being accused of something you haven’t done. I didn’t hear anything from Sir Bernard for ages, and as time went on I started to think he’d just been blowing smoke. But I suppose it wasn’t all that easy to arrange, and he was a busy man. Anyway, bless him, he came through in the end, and I got an appointment for an interview at the Norwich and Norfolk. My mum was upset I was going so far away. She said I should turn it down and find my own way, because the job wasn’t even in plastics. But it was a very good job – in intensive care, which was the next best thing – and I didn’t want to start again at the bottom doing agency work. And anyway, if I’d gone solo, how was I going to explain why I’d left Cloisterwood? No, I was pretty much bound to Sir Bernard – and grateful to him as well, I promise you. So I went to the interview, and I got the job.’

‘And what about David Rogers?’ Atherton asked.

She gave him a rather bitter look. ‘You would ask that. It wasn’t a good time for me. I was in a terrible state, and it was only after about a week that I realized he hadn’t rung me. I hadn’t told him I was going home to my mum’s, but he had my mobile number. That was how he always called me. Anyway, I got it into my head that he’d heard about what had happened, and he’d cut me off.’

‘Didn’t you try to call him?’ Slider asked.

‘I was angry and upset. I felt he ought to call me. I wasn’t going to chase after him if he had doubts about me. I’d sided with him over his scandal, and he ought to do the same with me. So I didn’t ring. And then when he kept not calling, it became a matter of pride. I thought “if that’s how little he trusts me, to hell with him”. So I went to Norwich and I thought that was that.’

‘But obviously it wasn’t,’ Slider prompted.

‘No,’ she said quietly, looking at her hands. ‘I should have trusted him. One day – it would have been about eight months later – I came off duty and there he was, waiting for me outside. He’d tracked me down. It was a bit of a stiff meeting at first, with hurt feelings on both sides. It turns out he thought I didn’t want to speak to him. He’d rung me at home – I mean, my flat – a couple of times and got no answer, and he knew I’d left Cloisterwood, so he assumed I was cutting him off and let it go. But then he heard somehow or other that I was at the Norwich, and decided to see if I still felt anything for him. So we started seeing each other again. He could only manage about once a week, because of his job – and the occasional weekend – but we were so happy when we were together. Then the following year – that was in ’06 – he asked me to marry him. And that’s when he told me about his real job.’

Slider felt such a surge of relief that they’d come to it at last, he almost fell off the chair. But such was his self control he was even able to say, ‘Yes please,’ when she asked if he’d like another cup. Atherton refused, and though he sat quite still, Slider knew him well enough to know that mentally he was chewing his fingernails.

When the second cups had been poured, she said, ‘Where had I got to?’

‘David asked you to marry him.’

‘Oh, yes.’ She looked away again, into the past. ‘I got off at two one day, and he took me for tea in the Assembly House. Then we went for a walk along the river. It was March, a cold day, with a nasty wind, but I never noticed it. We walked arm in arm and huddled up together, and to me it was as good as being on the beach in Spain in June. We found a bench in a sheltered spot and sat down. And he said he wanted to marry me.’ She sighed unconsciously. ‘I’d have said yes there and then, but he said that before I answered, he had to tell me some things. He said his job was very demanding and took him away a lot, and that even when we were married I wouldn’t see much of him, maybe no more than I saw of him now. So I said what was his job, because it didn’t seem to me that being in PR for a drugs firm was that demanding. And he said he hadn’t been in the PR job for a long time. Just about the time we first met he’d started something else. He said it was secret and very important work, and he couldn’t tell me more than that, because it might be dangerous, and he didn’t want me involved. I said couldn’t he trust me, if he wanted to marry me? And he said I had to trust him, because he’d never do anything to put me in danger.’

‘Secret, important and dangerous,’ Slider said, with an inward groan. ‘What did you think it was?’

‘Well, I couldn’t imagine, and we argued back and forth a bit, but he was adamant he wouldn’t tell me about it, and in the end I had to trust him, because I knew he’d never do anything wrong, and if I was going to marry him – well, I had to, didn’t I? I had the feeling that he was in the secret service, because he hinted there were foreign connections – and after all, what else is that secret? But he never would tell me, not from that day to this.’ Tears filled her eyes suddenly as she stubbed her mental toe on the fact that he was dead, something that had subsided in her mind while she talked to them. But she blinked the tears back hard, and got out a handkerchief and blew her nose with a determined honk. Slider was impressed by her self-control. There was more to this ordinary woman than met the eye.

‘So you got married?’ Slider prompted.

‘In May, at the register office. He’d bought this house already and had it done up, and in September when my notice at the Norwich and Norfolk was up, we moved into it. And that first day he gave me the deeds, and said he’d had it made over to me, as my wedding present, so that whatever happened I’d have somewhere to live.’

‘Whatever happened?’ Slider queried. ‘He was worried, then?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Actually, I don’t think he was worried then. He said the job could be dangerous, but I don’t think he really thought about that side of it. He seemed to be enjoying it. He was happy whenever I saw him. High-spirited, even. Sometimes he was tired, but he never seemed to be bothered by his job. He always said it was wonderful to be home, and he complained he wished he could see more of me, but that was the only thing he complained about. Until about a year ago.’

‘And what changed then?’ Slider asked.

‘Well,’ she said, considering. ‘I suppose looking back it might have been coming on for a while before that, but it was about a year ago I really started to notice it. He was quieter, thoughtful, as if he had something on his mind that was worrying him. Sometimes he’d arrive and he’d hardly have a thing to say. He’d sit staring at nothing for ages, or he’d go for a long walk on his own. If I tackled him about it he’d say nothing was wrong and try to snap out of it, but I knew. And then he started talking about what would happen if he died. He said he was having his will made up, to make sure I got everything. He brought a copy of it down one day and told me to keep it safe. That would be about last July. But it was only for about the last month or six weeks that he’s been really worried.’

‘In what way?’

‘Really jumpy. Anxious the whole time. Hardly speaking to me. Jumping out of his skin if the phone rang. He said that his job was coming to an end and there could be danger in it. That the people he’d been working with might decide it would be safer if he couldn’t talk. He told me he was afraid for me, too, and that I mustn’t talk to anyone about him. Well, I didn’t anyway, I never had, but he was extra insistent. He said if anything happened to him I’d be taken care of, but I’d have to lie low for a while and not let on to anyone about our relationship. He even gave me extra money to tide me over in case he suddenly disappeared. It had me worried, I can tell you. You’d need to have seen him to know how tense he was. But still I never thought anything would happen. You don’t, do you? Not until it does. And when I read that paragraph in the paper, I thought that the people who were after him were playing a trick, maybe to flush out his contacts or his colleagues or whatever. But then when he didn’t come down this week, and I didn’t hear from him, I started to think maybe something had happened. And then – and then you arrived.’

It took her some determined swallowing and nose work this time to regain her composure. Slider said, ‘I’m so sorry for your loss. But I have to ask you, have you any idea at all who these people were that he was afraid of? Or what sort of work he was involved in?’

She shook her head, emerging from the handkerchief with a red nose and a look of exhaustion. ‘None at all. He always kept that side of things from me, and I never asked because I knew that was the way he wanted it. He was too gentle and kind to be a secret agent, that’s what I always thought, but he must have been tough underneath it all to have done a job like that. And of course I was important to him, because it was only with me he could show the other side of himself, the gentle side. But in the end it got to him – the double life. That’s what I think. I’m afraid in the end he was so worn down with it that he made a mistake, and they got him. I can’t account for it otherwise.’

Slider could not make head nor tail of this. David Rogers, a secret service agent? Was it possible? If he was, he was the Niven James Bond rather than the Connery or Craig. But he came up against the problem that if he had been, the investigation would have been taken away from them straight away. Six had its own way of dealing with these things. No, no, whatever was going on, it wasn’t that. Secret and dangerous Rogers’s job might have been, but the man who romanced Cat Aude and Angela Fraser wasn’t doing important work for the country. He had been doing something that paid him handsomely in cash, and that was not the MI6 way. But on one thing he agreed with Helen Aldous – he had eventually made a mistake of some kind, and they had got him.

He asked, hoping for a new direction, ‘Do you know anything about Windhover?’

‘The Windhover?’ she said. ‘David’s boat, do you mean? It’s moored down at the Yacht Club.’

Slider blinked. ‘His boat is called the Windhover?’

She nodded. ‘Isn’t that what you meant? He loved that boat. He really, really loved it. That’s why he chose Southwold for us to live, because that’s where he was keeping it. That was his one recreation – fishing. Lots of consultants play golf but he hated the game, and he never cared about skiing or shooting or any of those things. But the one thing he never missed when he came down was his night fishing on the Windhover.’

‘He went night fishing?’ Slider said, puzzled.

‘He said it was the only real sport – sea fishing at night. Any other fishing was kids’ stuff to him. He was passionate about it. I didn’t begrudge him. I mean, we had little enough time together, but a man needs his hobby, and he worked so hard the rest of the time. He’d come down whenever he could get away, sometimes of a Tuesday, sometimes weekends, but whatever else happened he was always here on a Wednesday and he’d go out every Wednesday night in the Windhover. Then Thursday morning he was off straight from the harbour, so I never got to see his catch, but he said he was always lucky, always got something. He gave it away to whoever was in the harbour at the time. Well, he’d no use for raw fish in his sort of life – who’d have cooked it for him?’

Who indeed, Slider thought. Not one of his other women, that was for sure.

‘Did you never want to go with him?’ Atherton asked.

‘I’m not keen on boats,’ she said. ‘I could get seasick crossing a bridge. I did go with him once, though. We’d not long been married, and he begged me to come with him because we had so little time together, he didn’t want to waste it.’

Didn’t occur to him not to go, thought Atherton. Atta boy!

‘That was the time he got tangled up with that Dutch boat,’ she went on.

‘What was that?’

‘Well, we’d been going for a while, and it was fun at first, rushing through the dark, standing at the wheel with David’s arm round me, drinking champagne, with the wind whipping past. But eventually I started to get seasick – when it goes really fast it kind of skips and bumps on the waves, and my stomach was getting jolted. I told him I wasn’t feeling too hot, and after a bit he says he’ll stop. And he makes me a hot cup of tea and puts brandy in it and tucks me up in the bunk below with a hot water bottle. He was so gentle when he was taking care of me,’ she said with a tremble of the lips. ‘I think I dropped off for a bit, with the brandy, and being warm and relaxed. Anyway, I started to feel better, and I didn’t want to spoil his night, so I thought about getting up and going on deck again. And then I heard another boat coming up fast. I sat up and looked out of the window, just as it sort of whirled round and came to a stop beside us. And a man started shouting something. I couldn’t hear what it was. David shouted back, and it sounded as though they were having an argument. Anyway, after a bit the other boat starts up again and roars away. Then David comes down to see how I am.

‘I asked him about the other boat, and he said it was some Dutchman making out this was his fishing spot and complaining David was in the wrong place. But David sorted him out. Then he said he was going to take me home, because I wasn’t well. I said I was feeling a bit better and I didn’t want to spoil his fishing, but he said he’d sooner see I was all right, so we went back. That was the only time I went out with him. It was really a man thing, his fishing, and he was better off doing it alone.’

Slider’s mind was working so hard he wondered there wasn’t smoke coming out of his ears. ‘You don’t happen to remember the name of the Dutch boat, do you?’ he asked.

She raised her eyebrows. ‘Why on earth do you want to know that? It was just some old—’ She stopped as something obviously dawned on her. ‘You don’t mean,’ she went on in a lowered voice, ‘that he was meeting his contact? He wasn’t fishing at all?’

‘I don’t know,’ Slider said. ‘The thought occurred to me.’

She thought. ‘No,’ she concluded. ‘If I hadn’t been seasick, what then?’

Atherton answered. ‘There are lots of ways to make sure you were down in the cabin at the right moment.’

Still she shook her head. ‘No, I don’t believe it. He loved that boat, and he loved fishing.’

‘Do you remember the Dutch boat’s name, by any chance?’ Slider urged gently.

‘Well, as a matter of fact, I do. It was right under my nose, so to speak, when I looked out – it was about all I could see, with it being so close. It was called Havik – or however you pronounce it.’ She spelled it for him. ‘And there was another word underneath, a funny Dutch word beginning with I. Can’t remember what that was. That would be the harbour, wouldn’t it?’

‘Probably,’ Slider said.

‘But you’re quite wrong, you know,’ she went on. ‘Fishing was his passion. Fishing, and me – we were his real life. He kept his job separate, otherwise he wouldn’t have had a life at all.’

‘She probably wasn’t wrong about one thing,’ Slider said. ‘She was his real life. Poor sap didn’t have much else.’

‘I’m trying to figure out what he saw in her,’ Atherton said. ‘I suppose she was a bit of a rest cure after Amanda Sturgess. And with slightly more brain than the jiggling jugheads.’

‘She loved him,’ Slider said. ‘That was her attraction. She didn’t see him as an investment or a means to social advancement or a meal ticket. She just loved him – enough to remain secret and be grateful for seeing him once or twice a week.’

‘Hmph,’ said Atherton. ‘So did Aude and Fraser.’

‘That wasn’t love, that was delusion.’

‘My point exactly.’

‘No, I think there was more to this one. She said they came from the same background. Maybe he was reverting to the safety of his childhood.’

‘You mean she reminded him of his mum? That I can believe.’

Slider wouldn’t be baited. ‘And she was a nurse and he was a doctor. They’d have had plenty to talk about.’

‘Hmph again,’ said Atherton. ‘And what about this boat being called the Windhover? Was it a joke on Rogers’s part, to name the boat after his paymasters? What is a windhover anyway? Sounds like a helicopter.’

‘Country name for a kestrel.’

‘Trust you to know that.’

‘What are you so crabby about?’

‘I hate this woman being taken for a mug. Secret agent indeed! What kind of a chat-up line is that?’

‘You’re just annoyed you didn’t think of it first.’

Atherton’s face split in a reluctant grin. ‘At least with me it would be a credible story. So, harbour next?’

‘Harbour next. And keep your eyes peeled.’

There was no sign of anyone watching the house, or them. Slider was fairly confident that whoever ‘they’ were, they had not yet caught up with the secret wife. Or, if they knew about her, they didn’t think her dangerous, otherwise they’d have done her at the same time as Rogers. But he’d cautioned her to extra vigilance and warned her to speak to no one about David, and to ring him immediately if anyone tried to contact her.

‘And what happens next?’ she had asked him, looking utterly flattened, lost and doleful again, now that the stimulation of telling her story was over.

‘We continue to investigate, until we find who did this and why. And take them into custody. At that point I will let you know, and then we’ll be able to release the body to you for burial and you’ll be able to file for probate of his will. Until then, you must just be patient and keep your head down.’

‘I’ve been doing that for years,’ she said. ‘A few days longer won’t make any difference.’

‘A few days’ was a nice piece of optimism, or trust in their prowess. Slider hadn’t liked to mention at that point that if Rogers’s money was ill-gotten, she wouldn’t be getten it. At least she had the house – and how wise he had been to put that in her name straight away.

Southwold’s harbour was a modest affair, lying to the south of the town on the River Blyth, stretching from the river’s mouth nearly a mile upstream, but catering only for fishing boats, yachts and small pleasure craft. Those yearning for the delights and conveniences of a marina had to go further up the coast to Lowestoft, where there was every facility, including the Royal Norfolk and Suffolk Yacht Club in its grand white Edwardian clubhouse, looking like a cross between the Hotel Del Coronado and a vicarage conservatory.

The only facilities for yachtsmen in Southwold were the Harbour Inn, and upstream of it the clubhouse of the Southwold Yacht Club, which by contrast looked like a village cricket pavilion. The tie-ups were to rings in the harbour wall or rickety wooden jetties, and it was a brisk walk of a mile or so into the town for shops. The road along the harbour front wasn’t even paved, but a spring-busting melange of ruts, potholes and jutting lumps of concrete.

‘Now why would he choose this place, rather than a proper marina?’ Atherton wondered as they picked their way past the puddles. It was too early in the season for the place to be seething with tourists, but there were a fair few Sunday visitors, idling along sucking ice-creams, and buying fish from the tar-paper huts that lined the road.

‘Anonymity,’ Slider said. ‘He’d have thought he could slip in and out of here with much less scrutiny.’

‘Could he?’

‘Yes and no. Not much official scrutiny, that’s for sure. But a lot of prying unofficial eyes. In a place like this everyone tends to know everyone else’s business. On the other hand, they don’t tend to interfere in it.’

They strolled along like tourists, keeping an eye out for the Windhover. Helen Aldous had told them she was white, with dark-blue dodgers with her name on them. ‘They’re new, he only got them a couple of weeks ago, only they misspelled the name. David was furious. Now they say it’ll be six weeks before they can replace them. Not –’ she suddenly remembered – ‘that it matters now, I suppose.’

‘It’s surprising how often that happens,’ Slider said now to Atherton. ‘Our old super, Dickson, had a yachting friend whose boat was called Oenone, and when his dodgers arrived they said Oneone. He always called it the One One after that.’

‘Not a bad name, actually,’ Atherton said.

‘There she is,’ Slider said, spotting her at that moment.

The Windhover was tied up to one of the narrow wooden jetties that stuck out from the wall. This one had missing planks, a chain handrail on one side only, and, since the tide was down, a long drop to the grey, sucking water. Against the dilapidation, the boat rode the ebb-tide serenely, glowing with an almost feral beauty, though her dodgers, indeed, proclaimed to the world that she was called Windover.

Atherton had stopped dead, as though struck by lightning. He was not a yachting man, but he knew a classy item when he saw one. It was big, sleek, sexy, white and powerful, bristling with antennae for every navigational aide and electronic entertainment known to man. ‘That,’ he said in a reverent whisper, ‘is the dog’s bollocks. That is the veritable reproductive organs of the absolute canine. What would you call that? You can’t just call it a boat.’

‘A power yacht, I suppose,’ Slider said, admiring the rake of the superstructure, the fluid lines, the thrust and pointiness of the pointed end. ‘Sixty foot, I’d say,’ he remarked. ‘Twin engines. She looks fast.’

‘She looks like the rich man’s ultimate wet dream,’ Atherton said. ‘We no longer have to wonder why David Rogers had a boat. It’s an answer in itself.’

‘Night fishing, though,’ Slider said. ‘I suppose it was an excuse of sorts. Shall we have a look inside?’

Helen Aldous had provided them with a key. Inside it was immaculate, still smelling new. It was fitted out with tasteful luxury – wood panelling, leather upholstery, brass lamps with acid-embossed glass shades, varnished wooden decks and thick carpet in the staterooms. It was not huge inside, but so well laid-out that it felt roomy. But the beds were not made up and there were no personal belongings stowed anywhere. The cupboards were empty, and apart from soap and toilet paper in the heads, and a tin of biscuits and a bottle of brandy in the galley, it might just have come from the showroom.

‘I suppose he brought everything with him, trip by trip,’ Slider said. ‘She said he went out on Wednesday night and came back Thursday morning, so he didn’t sleep on-board. The galley looks as if it’s never been cooked in.’

‘What a waste,’ Atherton said. ‘It’s hard to believe a man who frequents strip clubs and picks up pole dancers wasn’t having tacky booze-fuelled parties and bonking cruises at every opportunity.’

The only thing of interest was found on the floor on the bridge: an enormous refrigerated cold box of white-painted aluminium, its plug lying next to the socket that would power it. ‘You could get a lot of champagne in that,’ Atherton said. But it was, in fact, empty as well as unplugged. ‘He must have been having parties,’ he complained. ‘Why else all the chiller capacity?’

‘To hold the fish he caught on his night fishing trips,’ Slider said.

‘Yeah, fish.’ They exchanged a look. ‘What contraband needs to be kept cold?’ Atherton mused. ‘Maybe he was smuggling caviar.’

There was nothing else to be gleaned from this ultimate empty vessel, which was sadly making no noise at all that might help them, just a gentle slapping of water against the hull and creaking of rope as she worked her moorings.

They teetered off the end of the rickety jetty on to solid land again, and turned for one last, baffled look at Rogers’s prize. And as if by magic a man materialized beside them: a short, squat man whose weather-pulverized face made it impossible to tell his age. He might have been sixty or eighty or anything in-between. He was hunched into a black donkey-jacket, his hands stuffed in the pockets; a battered and greasy black fisherman’s cap was pulled down hard on his head, and a cigarette drooped from his lip, making him screw up his eyes against the rising smoke. With native politeness he did not meet their eyes, looking instead, with an air of indifference, at the Windhover.

‘Thinking o’ buying her?’ he enquired.