Crossfire

10

What the bloody hell is going on?" Ian Norland stood full square in the middle of the Kauri House kitchen, shouting at my mother and me. He had thrown the bridle with the broken reins onto the bleached pine table.

"Ian, please don't shout at me," my mother said. "And what's the problem anyway? Scientific won, didn't he?"

"More by luck than judgment," Ian almost shouted at her. "It was just fortunate that the reins parted on the way to the start rather than in the race itself."

Or unfortunate, I thought.

"Why?" Ian said in exasperation. "Just tell me why."

"Why what?" I asked.

"Why did you made the reins break?"

"Are you accusing us of deliberately sabotaging the reins?" my mother asked in her most pompous manner.

"Yes," he said flatly. "I am. There's no other explanation. This bridle was brand-new. I put the Australian noseband on it myself just a few days ago."

"Perhaps there was a fault in its manufacture," I said.

He looked at me with contempt. "Do you take me for an idiot or something?"

I assumed it was a rhetorical question, and so I kept quiet.

"If I don't get some answers," he said, "then I'm leaving here tonight for good, and I will take this to the racing authorities on Monday morning." He picked up the bridle in his hand.

I wondered if it was worth pointing out to him that the bridle was not actually his to take away.

"But why?" my mother said. "Nothing happened. Scientific won the race."

"But you tried to make him lose it," Ian said, his voice again rising in volume towards a shout.

"What on earth makes you think we had anything to do with the reins breaking?" I asked him, all innocently.

He again gave me his contemptuous look. "Because you've been so bloody interested in the racing tack all week, asking questions and all. What else am I going to think?"

"Don't be ridiculous," said my mother.

"And how about the others?" he said.

"What others?" my mother asked rather carelessly.

"Pharmacist last week and Oregon the week before. Did you stop them from winning too?"

"No, of course not." My mother sounded affronted.

"Why should I believe you?" Ian said.

"Because, Ian," I said, in my best voice-of-command, "you must." He turned to look at me with fire in his eyes. I ignored him. "Of course you can go to the authorities if that is what you want. But what would you tell them? That you suspect your employer of stopping her horses. But why? And how? By cutting the reins? But it would not have been the first time that reins have broken on a racetrack, now, would it?"

"But-" Ian started.

"But nothing," I replied, cutting him off. "If you choose to leave here now, then I will have to insist that you do not take any of my mother's property with you, and that includes that bridle." I held out my hand towards him with the palm uppermost and curled my fingers back and forth. Reluctantly, he passed the bridle over to me.

"Good," I said. "Now let us understand each other. My mother's horses are always doing their best to win, and the stable is committed to winning on every occasion the horses run. My mother will not tolerate any of her employees who might suggest otherwise. She expects complete loyalty from her staff, and if you are not able to guarantee such loyalty, then indeed, you had better leave here this evening. Do I make myself clear?"

He looked at me in mild surprise.

"I suppose so," he said. "But you have to promise me that the horses will always be doing their best to win, and that there will be no more of this." He pointed to the bridle.

"I do promise," I said. There was no way I would be trying this cutting-the-reins malarkey again, I thought, and the horses would be doing their best even if they might be somewhat hampered by feeling ill. "Does that mean you're staying?"

"Maybe," he said slowly. "I'll decide in the morning."

"OK," I said. "We'll see you in the morning, then." I said it by way of dismissal, and he reluctantly turned away.

"I'll put the bridle back in the tack room for repair," he said, turning back and reaching out for it.

"No," I said, keeping a tight hold of the leather. "Leave it here."

He looked at me with displeasure, but there was absolutely no way I was going to let Ian leave the kitchen with the sabotaged bridle. Without it, he had nothing to show the authorities, even though, to my eyes, the ends of the stitches that I had cut with the scalpel looked identical to the few I had left intact, and which had then broken on the way to the start.

Ian must have seen the determination with which I was holding on to the bridle, and short of fighting me for it, he had to realize he wasn't going anywhere with it. But still he didn't leave.

"Thank you, Ian," my mother said firmly. "That will be all."

"Right, then," he said. "I'll see you both in the morning."

He slammed the door in frustration on his way out. I went over to the kitchen window and watched as he crunched across the gravel in the direction of his flat.

"How good a head lad is he?" I asked, without turning around.

"What do you mean?" my mother said.

"Can you afford to lose him?"

"No one is indispensable," she said, rather arrogantly.

I turned to face her. "Not even you?"

"Don't be ridiculous," she said again.

"I'm not," I said.

Dinner on Saturday night was a grim affair. Had it really been only one week since my arrival at Kauri House? It felt more like a month.

As before, the three of us sat at the kitchen table, eating a casserole that had been slow-cooking in the Aga while we had been at the races. I think on this occasion it was beef, but I didn't really care, and the conversation was equally unappetizing.

"So what do we do now?" I asked into the silence.

"What do you mean?" my stepfather said.

"Do we just sit and wait for the blackmailer to come a-calling?"

"What else do you suggest?" my mother asked.

"Oh, I don't know," I said in frustration. "I just feel it's time for us to start controlling him, not the other way round."

We sat there in silence for a while.

"Have you paid him this week?" I asked.

"Yes, of course," my stepfather replied.

"So how did you pay?"

"In cash," he said.

"Yes, but how did you give him the cash?"

"The same way as always."

"And that is?" I asked. Why was extracting answers from him always such hard work?

"By post."

"But to what address?" I asked patiently.

"Somewhere in Newbury," he said.

"And how did you get the address in the first place?"

"It was included with the first blackmail note."

"And when did that arrive?"

"In July last year."

When Roderick Ward had his accident.

"And the address has been the same since the beginning?" I asked him.

"Yes," he said. "I have to place two thousand pounds in fifty-pound notes in a padded envelope and post it by first-class mail each Thursday."

I thought back to the blackmail note that I had found on my mother's desk. "What happened that time to make you late with the payment?"

"I got stuck in traffic, and I didn't get to the bank in time to draw out the money before they shut."

"Couldn't you use a debit card in a cash machine?"

"It would only give me two hundred and fifty."

"Can you get me the address?" I asked.

As he stood up to fetch it, the telephone rang. As one, we all looked at the kitchen clock. It was exactly nine o'clock.

"Oh God," my mother said.

"Let me answer it," I said, standing up and striding across the kitchen.

"No," my mother shouted, jumping up. But I ignored her.

"Hello," I said into the phone.

There was silence from the other end.

"Hello," I said again. "Who is this?"

Again nothing.

"Who is this?" I repeated.

There was a click on the line and then a single tone. The person at the other end had hung up.

I replaced the receiver back on its cradle.

"Talkative, isn't he?" I said, smiling at my mother.

She was cross. "Why did you do that?" she demanded.

"Because he has to learn that we aren't going to just roll over and do everything he says."

"But it's not you that would go to prison," my stepfather said angrily.

"No," I said. "But I thought we'd agreed that we can't go on paying the blackmailer forever. Something has to be done to resolve the VAT situation, and the first thing I need to know is who the blackmailer is. I need to force him into a mistake. I want him to put his head up above the parapet, just for a second, so I can see him."

Or better still, I thought, so I can shoot him.

The phone rang again.

My mother stepped forward, but I beat her to it.

"Hello," I said. "Kauri House Stables."

There was silence again.

"Kauri House Stables," I repeated. "Can I help you?"

"Mrs. Kauri, please," said a whispered voice.

"Sorry?" I said. "Can you please speak up? I can't hear you."

"Mrs. Kauri," the voice repeated, still in the same quiet whisper.

"I'm sorry," I said extra-loudly. "She can't speak to you just now. Can I give her a message?"

"Give me Mrs. Kauri," the person whispered again.

"No," I said. "You will have to talk to me."

The line went click again as he hung up.

My mother was crosser than ever. "Thomas," she said, "please do not do that again." She was almost crying. "We must do as he says."

"Why?" I asked.

"Why!" she almost screamed. "Because he'll send the stuff to the tax man if we don't."

"No, he won't," I said confidently.

"How can you know?" she shouted. "He might."

"I think it most unlikely that he'll do anything," I said.

"I hope you're right," my stepfather said gloomily.

"What has he to gain?" I said. "In fact, he has everything to lose."

"I'm the one with everything to lose," my mother said.

"Yes," I agreed. "But you are paying the blackmailer two thousand a week, and he won't get that if he tips off the tax man. He's not going to give up that lucrative arrangement just because I won't let him speak to you on the telephone."

"But why are you antagonizing him?" my stepfather said.

More than two thousand years ago Sun Tzu, a mysterious Chinese soldier and philosopher, wrote what has since become the textbook of war, a volume that is still studied in military academies today. In The Art of War he stated that one should "beat the grass to startle the snake." What he meant was to do something unexpected to make the enemy give away their position.

"Because I need to see who it is," I said. "If I knew the identity of the enemy, I could then start to fight him."

"I don't want you to fight him," my mother said forlornly.

"Well, we have to do something. Tax returns are overdue, and it is only a matter of time before the VAT fraud is discovered. I need to identify the enemy, neutralize him, recover your money and tax papers and then pay the tax. And we need to do it all quickly."

The phone rang again. I picked it up.

"Kauri House Stables," I said.

Silence.

"Now, listen here you little creep," I said, beating the grass still further. "You can't speak to Mrs. Kauri. You'll have to speak to me. I'm her son, Thomas Forsyth."

More silence.

"And another thing," I said, "all the horses from these stables will, in the future, be trying their best to win. And if you don't like it, hard bloody luck. You can come and speak to me about it anytime you like, face-to-face. Do you understand?"

I listened. There was another few seconds of silence, followed by the now familiar click as he disconnected.

I had just committed a huge tactical gamble. I had put my head way up over the parapet, exposing myself to the enemy, beating the grass in the hope that this particular snake would be startled enough to give away his position, so I could shoot him.

But would he shoot me first?

Sunday had been an uneventful day, with apparently no further telephone calls from the whispering blackmailer. However, I couldn't be certain that he hadn't called during the time I'd been out in the middle of the day.

My mother had responded to my initiative of Saturday evening by withdrawing into her shell and not appearing at all from her bedroom until six in the evening, and only then briefly to raid the drinks cabinet before returning upstairs to bed. Derek had been dispatched downstairs later to make her a sandwich for her dinner.

I was certain that if the whisperer had called while I was out, my mother wouldn't have told me. Perhaps she felt like most of the civilians I had encountered in Afghanistan. Even though we firmly believed that we were fighting the Taliban on behalf of the Afghan people, they didn't seem to share the same view. The old adage "my enemy's enemy is therefore my friend" simply didn't apply. It was true that most of the population loathed the Taliban, but deep down they also hated the foreigners in their midst who were fighting them.

In the same way, I wondered if my mother considered me to be as much her enemy as her blackmailer.

Ian Norland had not made another appearance in the house on Sunday morning, and I had watched through the kitchen window as he had directed the stable staff in the mucking out, feeding and watering of the horses. I had taken it to mean that he had decided to stay, at least for the time being. Meanwhile, the broken reins in question were sitting safely in the locked trunk of my car.

At noon on Sunday I had driven into Newbury, using the Jaguar's satellite navigation system to find the address that Derek had finally given me, the address to which he sent the weekly cash payments.

"But it's so close," I'd said to my stepfather. "Surely you've been to see where it is you send all this money."

"He said not to," he'd replied.

"And you obeyed him?" I'd asked incredulously. "Didn't you just drive past to see? Even in the middle of the night?"

"We mustn't. We have to do exactly what he says." He had been close to tears. "We're so frightened."

I could see. "And how specifically did he tell you not to go and see where the money was going?"

"In a note."

"And where's the note now?" I'd asked him.

"I threw it away," he'd said. "I know I shouldn't have, but they made me feel sick. I threw all the notes away."

All of them except the one I'd found on my mother's desk.

"So when did the telephone calls start?"

"When he started telling us the horses must lose."

"And when was that?" I'd asked.

"Just before Christmas." Two months ago.

I hadn't really expected the address to provide any great revelation into the identity of the blackmailer, and I'd been right.

Forty-six Cheap Street in Newbury turned out to be a shop with rentable mailboxes, a whole wall of them, and suite 116 was not a suite of offices as one might have thought, but a single, six-by-four-inch gray mailbox at shoulder level. The shop had been closed on Sunday, but I had no great expectation that, had the staff been there, they would have told me who had rented box number 116. In due course, when I was ready, the police might be able to find out.

I had returned to Kauri House from Newbury via the Wheelwright Arms in the village for a leisurely lunch of roast beef with all the trimmings. I'd been in no particular hurry to get back to the depressing atmosphere at home. I decided it was time to start looking for more agreeable accommodation-past time, in fact.

Early the next morning, I drove to Oxford and parked in the multistory parking lot near the Westgate shopping center. The city center was quiet, even for a Monday in February. The persistent cold snap had deepened with a bitter wind from the north that cut through my overcoat as effortlessly as a well-honed bayonet through a Taliban's kurta. Most sensible people had obviously decided to stay at home, in the warm.

Oxford Coroner's Court was housed next door to the Oxfordshire County Council building in New Road, near the old prison. According to the court proceedings notice, the case in which I was interested was the second on the coroner's list for the day, the case of Roderick Ward, deceased.

It was too cold to hang around outside, so I sat in the public gallery for the first case of the day, the suicide of a troubled young man in his early twenties who had hanged himself in a house he'd shared with other students. His two female housemates cried almost continuously throughout the short proceedings. They had discovered the swinging body when they had returned from a nightclub at two o'clock in the morning, having literally stumbled into it in the dark.

A pathologist described the mechanics of death by strangulation due to hanging, and a policeman reported the existence of a suicide note found in the house.

Then the young man's father spoke briefly about his son and his expectations for the future that would now not be fulfilled. It was a moving eulogy, delivered with great dignity but with huge sadness.

The coroner, having listened to the evidence, thanked the witnesses for attending, then officially recorded that the young man had taken his own life.

We all stood up, the coroner bowed to us, we bowed back, and he departed through a door behind his chair. In all, the formal proceedings had taken just twenty minutes. It seemed to me to be a very swift finale to a life that had lasted some twenty-two years.

Next up was the inquest into the death of Roderick Ward.

There was an exchange of personnel in the courtroom. The young suicide's father and his weeping ex-housemates trooped out, along with the policeman and the pathologist who had given evidence. In came different men in suits, plus one in a navy blue sweater and jeans who joined me in the public gallery.

I glanced at him, and just for a moment, I thought he looked familiar, but when he turned full-face towards me, I didn't know him, and he showed no sign of having recognized me.

There was no young woman in the court who might have been Stella Beecher. But there again, she had never received the letter sent to her at 26 Banbury Drive by the Coroner's Office, to inform her that the inquest was going to reconvene today. I was absolutely sure of that, because the said letter was currently in my pocket.

The inquest began with the coroner giving the details of the deceased, Mr. Roderick Ward. His address was given as 26 Banbury Drive, Oxford, but even I knew that was false. So why didn't the court? I wanted to stand up and tell them they were wrong, but how could I do it without explaining how I knew? Once I started there would be no stopping, and the whole sorry saga of the tax evasion would be laid bare for all to see, and especially for the Revenue to see. My mother would be up on a charge quicker than a guardsman found sleeping on sentry duty.

The coroner went on to say that the body of the deceased had been identified by his sister, Mrs. Stella Beecher, of the same address. Another lie. Had the whole identification been a lie? Was the body found in the car actually that of Roderick Ward, or of someone else? And where was Stella Beecher now? Why wasn't she here? The whole business seemed fishy to me, but only because I knew that Roderick Ward himself had been busily working outside the law. To everyone else it was a simple but tragic road accident.

The first witness was a policeman from the Thames Valley Road Traffic Accident Investigation Team, who described the circumstances, as he had determined them, surrounding the death of Roderick Ward on the night of Sunday, July 12.

"Mr. Ward's dark blue Renault Megane had been proceeding along the A415 in a southerly direction," he said formally. "The tire marks on the grass verge indicate that the driver failed to negotiate the bend, veered over to the wrong side of the road and struck the concrete parapet of the bridge where the A415 crosses over the River Windrush. The vehicle appeared to have then gone into the river, where it was found by a fisherman at eight a.m. on the morning of Monday, July thirteenth. The vehicle was lying on its side with just six inches or so of it visible above the water level."

The coroner stopped him there as he made some handwritten notes. "Go on," he said eventually, looking up at the policeman.

"The vehicle was removed from the river by crane later that morning, at approximately ten-thirty. The deceased's body was discovered inside the vehicle when it was lifted. He was still strapped into the driver's seat by his seat belt. The Coroner's Office was immediately informed, and a pathologist attended the scene, arriving at"-he consulted his notebook-"eleven twenty-eight, by which time I had also arrived at the scene to begin my investigation."

The policeman paused again as the coroner wrote furiously in his own notebook. When the writing paused, the policeman went on.

"I examined the vehicle both at the scene and also at our vehicle-testing facility in Kidlington. It had been slightly damaged by the collision with the bridge but, other than that, was found to be in full working order with no deficiencies observed in either the braking or the steering. The seat belts were also noted to be in perfect condition, locking and unlocking with ease. At the scene I examined the concrete parapet of the bridge and the tire skid marks on the grass verge. There were no marks visible on the road surface. It appeared to me from my examinations that while the vehicle had struck the bridge wall, this collision in itself was unlikely to have been of sufficient force to prove fatal. While it was noted that the airbag in the vehicle had deployed, the damage to both vehicle and bridge indicated that the collision was minor and had occurred at a relatively low speed."

He paused and drank some water from a glass.

"From the position and directions of the marks on the grass and the lack of skid marks on the road, I conclude that the driver might have fallen asleep at the wheel, been awakened when the vehicle rose up onto the grass verge, had then braked hard, slowing the vehicle to between ten and fifteen miles per hour, before it struck the bridge parapet. The force of the collision, although fairly minor, had been sufficient to bounce the vehicle sideways into the river, the damage to the car and the bridge being consistent with that conclusion."

The policeman stopped and waited while the coroner continued to make notes.

"Has anyone any questions for this officer," said the coroner, raising his head from his notebook.

"Yes, sir," said a tall gentleman in a pin-striped suit, standing up.

The coroner nodded at him, clearly in recognition.

"Officer," the tall man said, turning to the policeman in the witness box. "In your opinion, would this life have been saved if a crash barrier had been fitted at the point where the car went off the road into the water?"

"Most probably, yes," said the policeman.

"And would you agree with me," the pin-striped suit went on, "in your capacity as a senior police accident investigator, that the failure of the Oxfordshire County Council to erect a crash barrier at that known accident black spot was tantamount to negligence on their behalf, negligence that resulted in the death of Roderick Ward?"

"Objection," said another suit, also standing up. "Counsel is leading the witness."

"Thank you, Mr. Sims," said the coroner. "I know the procedures of this court." He turned towards the first suit."Now, Mr. Hoogland, I agreed that you could ask questions of the witnesses in this case, but you know as well as I do that the purpose of this court is to determine the circumstances of death and not to apportion blame."

"Yes, sir," replied Mr. Hoogland, "but it can be within the remit of this court to determine if there has been some failure in the system. It is my client's position that a systematic failure by the county council to address the safety of the public at this point on the highway network has contributed to the death of Mr. Ward."

"Thank you, Mr. Hoogland. I am also well aware of the remits and responsibilities of this court." The coroner was clearly not amused at being lectured in his own courtroom. "However, your question of the officer was whether, in his opinion, there had been negligence in the matter of this death. This question is not answerable by this court, and would be better asked in any civil case that may be brought in a county court." He turned to the witness. "I uphold Mr. Sims's objection. Officer, you need not answer Mr. Hoogland's question."

The policeman looked relieved.

"Are there any further questions of this witness?"

There was no fresh movement from Mr. Hoogland other than to sit down. He had made his point.

However, I now wanted to stand up and ask the officer if, in his opinion as a senior police accident investigator, the circumstances of this death could have been staged such that it only appeared that the deceased had fallen asleep, hit the bridge and ended up in the river, when, in fact, he had been murdered?

But of course I didn't. Instead, I sat quietly in the public gallery in frustration, wondering why I was suddenly becoming obsessed with the idea that Roderick Ward had been murdered. What evidence did I have? None. And indeed, was the deceased actually Roderick Ward in the first place?

"Thank you, officer," said the coroner. "You may step down, but please remain within the vicinity of the court in case you are needed again."

The policeman left the witness box and was replaced by a balding, white-haired man with half-moon spectacles and wearing a tweed suit. He stated his name as Dr. Geoffrey Vegas, resident pathologist at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford.

"Now, Dr. Vegas," said the coroner, "can you please tell the court what knowledge you have concerning the deceased, Mr. Roderick Ward?"

"Certainly," replied the doctor, removing some papers from the inside pocket of his jacket. "On the morning of July thirteenth I was asked to attend the scene of an RTA-a road traffic accident-near Newbridge, where a body had been discovered in a submerged vehicle. When I arrived at the scene the body was still in the car, but the car had been lifted from the river and was on the road. I examined the body in situ and confirmed that it was of a male adult and that life was extinct. I gave instructions that the body be removed to my laboratory at the John Radcliffe."

"Did you notice any external injuries?" asked the coroner.

"Not at that time," replied the doctor. "The surface of the skin had suffered from immersion in the water, and the extremities and the face were somewhat bloated. The cramped conditions in the car did not lend themselves to more than a limited examination."

And I bet they weren't very pleasant conditions, either. I'd once had to deal with some dead Taliban whose bodies had been submerged in water, and it was not a task I chose to dwell on.

"And did you perform a postmortem examination at the hospital?"

"Yes," replied Dr. Vegas. "I completed a standard autopsy examination of the deceased that afternoon in my laboratory. My full report has been laid before the court. I concluded that death was due to asphyxia, that's suffocation, resulting in cerebral hypoxia and then cardiac arrest. The asphyxia appeared to be due to prolonged immersion in water. Put simply, he drowned."

"Are you certain of that?" the coroner asked.

"As certain as any pathologist could be. There was water present in the lungs, and in the stomach, both of which indicate that the deceased was alive when he entered the water."

"Are there any other findings that you would like to bring specifically to the court's attention?" asked the coroner, who, I thought, must have surely read the pathologist's full report prior to the hearing.

"A blood test indicated that the deceased had been more than three times over the legal alcohol limit for driving a vehicle on the public highway." He said it in a manner that clearly indicated that the accident, and the death, had been the deceased's own fault, and nothing else mattered.

"Thank you, doctor," said the coroner. "Does anyone else have any questions for this witness?"

I wanted to jump up and ask him if he had carried out a DNA test to be certain that the body was actually that of Roderick Ward. The police must have had his DNA on record after his arrest for throwing the brick in Hungerford. And I also wanted to ask the doctor why he was so certain that the deceased had died in the way he had described. Had he done a test to confirm that the water in the lungs had actually come from the river? Could the man not have been forced to drink heavily, then been drowned elsewhere and just tipped into the river in his car when he was already dead? Could the pathologist be certain it wasn't murder? Had he, in fact, even considered murder as an option?

But of course, again I didn't. Once more I remained sitting silently in the public gallery, wondering if I was looking for something sinister in this death that didn't actually exist. Something that might begin to lead me to a resolution of my mother's problems.

Mr. Hoogland, however, did stand up again to ask some questions of the doctor, but even he would have had to admit that in the light of the blood-alcohol evidence, he was on a hiding to nothing.

"Dr. Vegas," he began anyway, "can you tell the court if, in your opinion, Mr. Ward would be alive today if a crash barrier had been installed at that location, preventing his vehicle from entering the water? Were there, for example, any injuries you found that he had sustained in the accident that would, by themselves, have proved fatal without his drowning?"

"I can state that there were no injuries that Mr. Ward had suffered in the collision which would normally have resulted in loss of life," the doctor replied. "In fact, there were almost no injuries of note, just a minor contusion to the right side of the head that would be consistent with it banging against the driver's-door window during the collision with the bridge." He turned to the coroner. "This may have been sufficient to render the deceased briefly unconscious or unaware, especially in his inebriated condition, but it would have been insufficient, on its own, to cause death. On examination of the deceased's brain, I found no evidence of injury as a result of the collision."

It was obviously not the specific unequivocal answer that Mr. Hoogland had been hoping for. He tried again. "So let me get this clear, Dr. Vegas. Are you saying that Mr. Ward would now be alive if a safety barrier had been present at the spot?"

"That I cannot say," replied the doctor. He pulled himself up to his full height and delivered the killer blow to Mr. Hoogland's argument. "In the state that Mr. Ward must have been in that night from drink, there is no saying that if he had been able to drive on from that point, he wouldn't have killed himself, and possibly others, in another road traffic accident somewhere else."

The coroner, using his notes, summed up the evidence and then recorded a verdict of accidental death, with Mr. Ward's excessive alcohol consumption as a contributory factor.

No one objected, no one cried foul, no one believed that a whitewash had occurred. No one other than me, that was. And maybe I was just being paranoid.

I stood up and followed the man in the navy blue sweater and jeans out of the courtroom.

"Are you family?" I asked his back.

He turned towards me, and I thought again that I recognized him.

"No," he said. "Are you?"

"No," I said.

He smiled and turned away. In profile, I was struck once more by his familiarity. I was about to say something more to him when I realized who he must be.

It was true that I'd never met the man before, but I was certain I'd spoken to his father only the previous Friday. They had exactly the same shape of head.

The other man in the public gallery had been Fred Sutton, the detective sergeant son of Old Man Sutton, he of the broken window and the false teeth.

I hung back as Fred Sutton made his way out of the court building. I didn't really want to talk to him, but I did want to speak to the unfortunate Mr. Hoogland.

I caught up with him in the lobby. Close up he was even taller than he had appeared in court. I was almost six foot, but he towered over me.

"Excuse me, Mr. Hoogland," I said, touching him on the arm. "I was in the court just now, and I wondered who you were acting for."

He turned and looked down at me. "And who are you?" he demanded.

"Just a friend of Roderick Ward's," I said. "I wondered if you were acting for his family. None of them seem to be here."

He looked at me for a second or two, as if deciding whether to tell me or not. "I am acting for a life insurance company," he said.

"Really," I said. "So was Roderick's life insured?"

"I couldn't say," said the lawyer, but it was pretty obvious it had been; otherwise, why was he here asking questions and trying to imply negligence by the county council? Insurance companies would try anything to save themselves from having to pay out.

And who, I wondered, was the potential beneficiary of the insurance?

"So were you satisfied with the verdict?" I asked.

"It's what we expected," Mr. Hoogland said dismissively, looking past my right shoulder.

Time to dive in, I thought. "Are you absolutely sure that the dead man in the car was Roderick Ward?"

"What?" he said, suddenly giving me his full attention.

"Are you sure that it was Roderick Ward in that car?" I asked again.

"Yes, of course. The body was identified by his sister."

"Yes, but where is the sister today?" I said. "And is she the beneficiary of your client's insurance policy?"

He stared at me. "What are you implying?"

"Nothing," I lied. "I'm just curious. If my brother had died, and I'd been the one to identify him, then I'd be at the inquest." Mr. Hoogland wasn't to know that the coroner's letter to Stella Beecher was in my pocket.

"Why didn't you say this in court?" he asked.

"I'm not what they call an 'officially interested party,'"I said. "So why would I be allowed to speak? And it's not compulsory for members of the deceased's family to be present at an inquest. Anyway, I don't have access to the full pathologist's report. For all I know, he might have already done a DNA test and double-checked it against the national DNA database."

"Why would Roderick Ward's DNA be in the database?" he asked.

"Because he was arrested two years ago for breaking windows," I replied. "It should be there."

Mr. Hoogland opened a notebook and made some notes.

"And what is your name?" he asked.

"Is that important?" I said.

"You can't go round making accusations anonymously."

"I'm not accusing anyone," I said. "I just asked you if you were sure it was Roderick Ward in that car."

"That in itself is an accusation of fraud."

"Or murder," I said.

He stared at me again. "Are you serious?"

"Very," I said.

"But why?"

"It just seems too easy," I said. "Late at night on a country road with little or no traffic, low-speed collision, contusion on the side of the head, alcohol, car tips into convenient deep stretch of river, no attempt to get out of the car, life insurance. Need I go on?"

"So what are you going to do about your theory?"

"Nothing," I said. "It's not me that has the client who's about to pay out a large sum in life insurance."

I could see in his face that he was having doubts. He must be asking himself if I was a complete nutter.

"You've nothing to lose," I said. "At least find out for sure if the deceased really was Roderick Ward by getting a DNA test done. Maybe the pathologist already has. Look in his report."

He said nothing but stared at a point somewhere over the top of my head.

"And ask the pathologist if he tested to determine if the water in the lungs actually came from the river."

"You do have a suspicious mind," he said, again looking down at my face.

"Did Little Bo Peep actually lose her sheep, or were they stolen?"

He laughed. "Did Humpty Dumpty fall, or was he pushed?"

"Exactly," I said. "Do you have a card?"

He fished one out of his jacket pocket and gave it to me.

"I'll call you," I said, turning away.

"Right," he shouted to my departing back. "You do that."