The Best British Mysteries III

Max Winner’s Shadow by Peter Turnbull

The man enjoyed the work. He always did. Just he and his dog and a summer’s morning. It was ‘their time’ – his feet crumbling the loose gravel on the towpath as the last of the haze rose from the canal and his dog twisting and turning, now ahead of him, now beside him, now behind him, now ahead of him, now beside him, now behind him, now ahead of him again. They rounded the bend of the canal and entered the phase of the walk that the man loved most of all, where thick vegetation grew at either side of the canal and reached out over the water, so that in summer especially, when the foliage was at its most lush, this part of the canal resembled a walk in a tunnel. It was in this section of the York canal that the man saw the greatest incidence of wildlife, the moorhens, kingfishers, stoats, and water rats. The latter he minded not, for like all creatures, they had a place in the scheme of things. Here they were wild, not scavengers living off the debris of humankind, and he chose to accept them as beasts in their own place. And he also saw insects, dragonflies, butterflies, spiders. At the end of the ‘tunnel’ ahead of him, he could see the black-and-white gates of the ‘Larkfield Three-Rise’, a tier of three locks which lifted the canal up a full thirty feet to its next section, which took it across the Wold towards Hull and the seaport there. Or lowered it for the final stretch into York, depending upon which way the barge, now a pleasure craft rather than a working boat, was travelling. The man walked slowly, savouring the walk, just he and his best friend. An onlooker would see a man in his sixties, plus fours, stout shoes, a tweed jacket, and a white Norfolk hat, and with him, a confident chocolate-brown Labrador. The man left the shade of the ‘tunnel’ and put himself at the inclined path which ran alongside the three-rise until he stood at the top. These days he was finding the incline difficult…even a short incline such as this he found hard. He could, he felt, walk forever upon the flat, but inclines were proving difficult. He paused at the top of the incline and pondered the next section of the walk, another six hundred yards of canal towpath and then he’d turn into the wood and begin the sweep back towards home. He expected to be home by nine-thirty…in time for Morning Service on the BBC. It was a good walk, about three hours long, and he and his friend did it together twice a week, in all but the most extreme weather conditions.

Then he saw a shiny black object in the canal, and tutted at folk who thought nothing of throwing their refuse into the water. With a jolt, he realised that he wasn’t looking at a black bin liner containing domestic rubbish, he was looking at oily water shimmering on a leather jacket which encased a human body, floating face down in the water.

The body was that of a female. The first police officer to attend waded into the canal and was eventually forced to swim the last few feet, the water being just too deep for a tall man to wade. He reached the body, gasping at the chill of the water despite it being high summer, and rolled it face up, just in case there was still time, but the pale and bloated, macerated skin said that all hope had gone. He swam sideways, dragging the body with him back to the towpath, where he and his colleague together hauled the body out of the water. Closer examination showed her to be a woman of middle years and possibly, probably, of privileged living. The leather jacket was not inexpensive, neither was the watch, nor the jewellery, nor the skirt, nor the shoes, which had remained on her feet, held firmly as the body expanded.

One of the police officers, the one who remained dry, stayed with the corpse. The other, saturated and chilled, walked to where they had parked the area car. He called Friargate police station, requested the police surgeon and CID attendance. He added that the death was probably suspicious, if only because middle-aged, middle-class women do not walk along canal towpaths alone at night. They just don’t.

When, thirty minutes later, the police surgeon arrived, he noticed a blue-and-white police tape around the body, which by then lay under a black plastic sheet. He noted a member of the public being told firmly but politely that he couldn’t walk along the canal despite the fact that he did that each morning. The police surgeon approached the tape, knelt by the body, lifted the plastic sheet, and let it fall reverently back in place as the member of the public turned and walked sullenly away.

‘I can confirm life extinct.’ The police surgeon stood. ‘At nine-ten a.m.’

‘Nine-ten a.m., sir?’ the police constable repeated and noted in his notebook. He glanced up and noted two figures walking towards them along the towpath. ‘CID here now, sir.’

‘Good…I think they’ll be needed.’ He turned and glanced and nodded at the approaching figures, one a white male, the other a black female. Both tall, both slim, walking easily in each other’s company, occasionally rubbing shoulders; two people who like each other. ‘Dr Truelove,’ he said when the officers were close enough.

‘DCs Pharoah and Markov.’ The woman spoke. ‘I’m Pharoah.’

‘We haven’t met. Not local, are you, by your accent?’

‘St Kitts, via Stoke Newington, London.’ Carmen Pharoah smiled.

‘Pleased to meet you. Well, to the matter in hand.’ Truelove turned to the body. ‘I think you’ll be needing a pathologist. The police constable who phoned it in was correct to assume suspicious circumstances. She didn’t drown, you see. I can tell that virtually at a glance. Eyes closed, you see. She was either unconscious or deceased before she entered the water. But that’s really the territory of the Home Office pathologist, not I.’

‘I see,’ Carmen Pharoah said. ‘Pathologist, as you say.’

‘I’ve pronounced life extinct at nine-ten, this day. It’s really up to the pathologist now.’

‘Wonder where she came into the canal?’ Carmen Pharoah said, more to herself than anyone around her. ‘No sign of a struggle here that I can see.’

‘Up there.’ The constable spoke. He pointed along the canal, away from the locks, towards Hull and the coast. ‘She would have drifted down overnight. Canals have currents, like rivers.’

‘I didn’t know that.’ Markov spoke.

‘It’s true, sir.’ The police constable spoke confidently. ‘All canals are the same. They benefit from rainwater which runs off the land into the canal, but each canal has a river or a stream or a lake close to the highest point and they flow down from there. This part of the canal drains into the Ouse at York.’ He turned. ‘In that direction. So she would have drifted down from the opposite direction until she reached the locks, where she was caught.’

‘Makes sense.’ Markov nodded. ‘We’ll take a walk up there.’ Carmen Pharoah pressed the Send button on her radio and called Friargate police station, requesting the pathologist and the mortuary van. She and Markov walked eastwards along the towpath in the opposite direction of the current. As she walked, she had to concede that this really was a very, very attractive part of England, lush fields and a flat landscape. She thought that she might settle here after all. She knew that she couldn’t go back to London…horror of horrors…the commuting…and while St Kitts would always be ‘home’, to return there was not an option. But York, and North Yorkshire…an ancient city… affordable housing…vast skies produced by a flat landscape.

There are worse places.

Every few hundred yards along the York and Hull canal, as with all British canals, there are stone ramps which lead from the towpath into the water, the ramps being inclined towards each other with a gap of about six feet between them. Their purpose was to enable a horse to be recovered from the canal, so that should a horse that was pulling a barge slip into the canal, it could be unhitched from the barge and worked along the canal, through the water, until a ramp was reached where it could easily walk back up to the towpath, and be returned and rehitched to the barge. Diesel engines have rendered such ramps redundant, but they remain, and the six-foot gap between each ramp tends to be a collection point for floating debris. It was between two such ramps that Simon Markov noticed a handbag, black leather, floating among the plastic bags and bottles. He knelt down and fished it out of the water.

The handbag, by its contents, belonged to one Sadie Winner. The driving licence in that name gave an address of Dovecote Cottage, Lesser Listlea, North Yorkshire.

‘I wonder what sort of car she drove?’ Markov pondered. ‘She wasn’t without money. Lesser Listlea is a wealthy village, it’s not far from here…and this handbag alone…’

‘She drove a Beemer,’ said Carmen Pharoah.

Markov smiled at her. ‘How do you know that?’

‘Ah…’ Pharoah grinned. ‘And I also know the colour. It’s silver. German racing silver, as you’d expect of a BMW’

‘How -?’

‘Because it’s there.’ She pointed to a road bridge over the canal about fifty yards away. The car was not fully visible, just the roof, but sufficient to be able to identify it. A BMW in German racing silver. Stationary, where a car would not be parked.

Markov placed the handbag in the self-sealing production bag and he and Carmen Pharoah walked yet further along the canal, to the bridge, to the steps from the towpath to the road. They examined the car. The doors were not locked, the keys were still in the ignition.

‘The only reason this is still here is that its location was not known to the car thieves,’ Markov said softly, more to himself than to Carmen Pharoah. ‘So, did she fall or was she pushed?’

‘Oh, pushed, I expect,’ Pharoah replied matter-of-factly, but with tongue in cheek.

‘I expect so as well.’ He reached for his radio and pressed the Send button. He reported the location of the car and its possible relevance to the incident, requesting a constable and a roll of blue and white police tape. ‘She didn’t commit suicide… The police surgeon believes that she was not breathing when she went into the water. It’s not a suicide spot anyway… So if she was attacked, the attacker had no interest in her possessions…the motive wasn’t robbery. Her handbag, her jewellery say so.’

‘Didn’t want the car, either,’ added Pharoah. ‘He or she or they had to have had a personal motive, unless it was a random attack.’

‘It’s not the place for a random attack,’ Markov said. ‘On the one hand it’s isolated, but on the other, there’s quite a lot of traffic down the road. My money is on a personal motive.’

Leaving a constable on duty by the BMW which had blue and white police tape fastened round it, Markov and Pharoah drove to Dovecote Cottage, Lesser Listlea. They found that Dovecote Cottage was a cottage in the same sense that the chapel at Kings College, Cambridge, is a ‘chapel’ despite being as large as a small cathedral; and in the same sense that York is a city despite the fact that in terms of its area, it could fit within the confines of a housing estate in a major city. Dovecote Cottage revealed itself to be a half-timbered Elizabethan manor house, built in an L shape in front of a gravelled courtyard in the middle of which stood a stone fountain belonging to a later, possibly Victorian era… So thought Markov as he slowed the car to a halt beside the Bentley which stood near the front door. The door of the house opened as Markov and Pharoah stepped out of their car.

‘Yes?’ The man was well built, fifty-something. A dark-blue towelling dressing gown covered silk pyjamas.

‘Police.’

‘Yes?’

‘Mr Winner?’ Markov approached and showed his ID.

“Tis I.’

‘We have a few questions…’

‘You’d better come in.’

Winner received the police in the hallway of his house, where they sat opposite each other on benches which stood alongside walls of ancient beams.

‘Oh my,’ he said when Markov revealed the reason for their visit. ‘Oh my…’

‘Do you know what her car would be doing on the bridge over the canal?’

‘The bridge in question…it’s on the route that she favours to get from the village to York. She drives it daily. I prefer the main road, but she likes the rural route. But I’ve no idea why she should have stopped where she did. Which way was the car pointing?’

‘Towards the village.’

‘So she was coming home. She was very cautious…she wouldn’t have stopped, not unless it was because she knew someone…someone she recognised.’

‘What time did you expect your wife to return home?’

‘Last night? About nine-thirty, ten. She went to visit her sister, she lives in York. The two of them, once they get their heads together, at my expense…calling up all my past misdeeds and indiscretions. She was about to take me to the cleaner’s… They would have spent the evening planning my ruin.’

‘So, you’d benefit from your wife’s death?’

‘Oh yes… In fact, I’m just beginning to realise just what a great weight might have been lifted from my shoulders…just what a shadow I am escaping from, if it is my wife.’

‘We’ll have to ask you to accompany us to York District Hospital to identify the body…if you can.’

‘The car, the handbag, the clothing you describe – it’ll be her all right. But yes, formality has to be observed.’

‘Before we go, could you tell us where you were at about nine-thirty last night?’

‘Here.’

‘Alone?’

‘Alone. I was working. The industry is in a bad state at the moment.’

‘The industry?’

‘Electronics. I am the Winner of Winner Electronics, the factory on the industrial estate.’

‘Ah yes,’ Markov nodded.

‘I’m asking my managers to put in unpaid overtime to avert collapse. I can’t do that if I’m not prepared to do the same.’

‘Of course.’

‘I made a few phone calls…sent a few faxes… They could be confirmed. I have itemised bills. The people to whom I spoke will be able to confirm that ‘twas I who spoke.’

‘This was at nine-thirty?’

‘No… No, earlier. I was reading reports at about that time…then I went outside. I enjoy the dusk at this time of year – that would have been about nine-thirty, ten, just outside in the garden – but I was alone.’

‘Your wife, was she depressed of late?’

‘No… Just the opposite, in fact. She was enthusiastic in a vindictive sort of way…burning up with determination to fleece me in a divorce settlement.’

‘But she was living here?’

‘All part of the Great Plan to ruin me. Can’t bring a lady friend home while she’s in the house, can I? And she knows it. We sleep separately, but it’s still the one roof… Makes things very difficult for me.’

‘Not the sort of person to take her own life, then?’

‘Hardly.’ Winner smiled. ‘My wife take her own life, I hardly think so… No…not a chance. She had everything to live for, i.e, my total ruin. She was poised to take half of what I possess, plus a massive amount of maintenance. She had a lot to live for. She and her sister had their knives out for me.’

‘So you really have benefited from her death? If it is she?’

‘Oh yes, only the collapse of my business empire to worry about now. A minor headache by comparison. I make no secret of it. I have no feelings for my wife now. I haven’t for a long time. I was angry about the possible divorce settlement because she wasn’t very supportive of me while I was building up…more of a hindrance. I really did it despite her, not because of her.’

‘So, it’s not true that behind every successful man there is a good woman?’

‘Not in my case, it’s not. Just isn’t. I certainly could have used such a female in my life, but it wasn’t my lot. I’d come home each day to a wife screaming for new clothes and no food. She would say that if I was hungry I could send out for a pizza. I went for her looks and found them skin-deep and that the skin was covering a very ugly personality. I should have listened to my grandmother when she told me to shut my eyes and listen to the voice. “Do your courting on the telephone,” she’d say. I should have listened.’

‘She sounds like a sensible woman.’

‘She was. She’s still alive but her mind is away. I visit her when I can, but it’s difficult to sit with a woman who once was full of such horse sense and wisdom who now thinks she’s a little girl and doesn’t recognise me. Keeps asking me if her daddy’s going to come home from the war. Anyway, I’ll claw my kit on, go and see the corpse. Never done this before…’ Winner stood.

‘It’s not like what you may have seen in the films… She won’t be pulled out of a drawer, you’ll see her from behind a glass screen.’

‘It will be as if she is floating,’ added Pharoah.

It was in fact just as Carmen Pharoah had described. The woman floating on a bed, tightly tucked up. ‘It is she,’ said Max Winner. ‘That’s my wife, Sadie Winner, aged forty-five years. Quite frankly, I don’t know which one of us rests in peace.’

Bill Hatch stood – a short, balding, rotund man with stubby fingers. He was the sort of man who would be found in a pigeon loft lovingly stroking his beloved birds, or perhaps reading a tabloid newspaper on the top deck of a bus, or downing pints of mild and bitter in a smoky pub. But he was, in fact, a Home Office pathologist. He examined the corpse of Sadie Winner in the pathology laboratory of the York District Hospital and said, ‘The police surgeon is quite correct. Even before I make the first and even slightest incision, I can tell you that she didn’t drown.’

‘No?’ Carmen Pharoah responded from the corner of the room from where she was observing the post-mortem for the police.

‘No.’ He ran his hands through Sadie Winner’s scalp hair. ‘No, she was hit over the head. A single blow, feels like from behind… We’ll see.’ He took a scalpel and made an incision round the perimeter of the skull above the level of the ears and then peeled the scalp back and revealed the skull. ‘Yes…fractured skull…bleeding was internal…subdural haematoma…a single blow with a blunt object…caused a starlike fracturing. She also had a very thin skull. A person with a thicker skull might have survived this blow, but in her case, death would have been instantaneous.’

Carmen Pharoah met Simon Markov, as arranged, for lunch in the town. Later they walked the walls back towards Friargate, the ancient city spreading out at either side beneath them. They walked in silence, enjoying each other’s company, then Carmen Pharoah said, ‘If you had battered someone over the head, what would you do with the murder weapon?’

‘Get rid of it.’

‘In the first conventional place?’

‘Yes.’

‘Such as a canal, for instance?’

Markov smiled at her. ‘Yes, such as a canal, for instance?’

‘A job for the frog boys. We’ll ask Ken Menninot to authorise it. Meanwhile, to matters of greater import.’ She slid her arm into his. ‘Tonight I thought we’d eat Chinese.’

‘Can do, if you wish. In fact…’ Markov paused and halted. ‘Look.’ He indicated towards the railway station below and across the road from where they stood on the battlements. ‘Isn’t that Max Winner?’

‘It is.’

The two cops watched as Max Winner stood talking with a woman many, many years his junior. She was slender, ginger-haired, casually dressed. The woman suddenly stepped forwards and kissed him. Max Winner responded by holding her upper arms, but perfunctorily so. She was more interested in him than he was in her. Their body language said so.

Ken Menninot, Sergeant, CID, listened to Pharoah’s feedback on the PM and her theory about the discarding of the murder weapon. He authorised a small team of divers to search the canal beneath the bridge on which Sadie Winner’s car had been located. The murder weapon revealed itself to have been a smooth rock, large enough to just fit in one hand, inside a woollen hiking sock. When swung, it would have made quite an impact, especially on an unusually thin skull.

Pharoah and Markov drove out to Winner’s house.

‘I thought I’d see you again,’ he said pleasantly. ‘Only not quite so soon.’ He stood at the entrance of his house. As he and the cops stood there, a woman bundled out of the house, elbowing him aside, carrying a cardboard box with her.

The woman stopped at the sight of Pharoah and Markov, both in plain clothes but both with the unmistakable stamp of police officers about them. She turned and yelled ‘Murderer!’ at Winner. Then she stamped off to a small car and drove angrily away.

‘My sister-in-law,’ Winner explained apologetically. ‘Won’t you come in? Please.’

On this occasion Winner received Pharoah and Markov in the sitting room of his house. The cops, reading the room, noted he had a taste for antiques – furniture, china, paintings. ‘The distress you just witnessed,’ he said, settling into a chair, ‘is due in part, I believe, to the fact that my ex-wife’s sister believed that her money troubles would have been solved upon our divorce. My ex-wife’s sister and her husband live a very hand-to-mouth existence. The car she had… I’ve never seen it before. She must have borrowed it. She certainly doesn’t own one.’

‘I see.’

‘Tell you the truth, your arrival rescued me. But she’ll be back, collecting Sadie’s possessions and anything of mine I may be foolish enough to leave behind. In fact, she didn’t make an attempt to remove all Sadie’s possessions, gives her the excuse to come back.’

‘You could leave them at the door.’

‘I could, couldn’t I? That hadn’t occurred to me.’ Winner smiled. ‘It is my house, after all, isn’t it?’

‘Mr Winner,’ Markov said, ‘that young woman that you were speaking to outside the railway station this lunchtime -

‘You saw us?’

‘We were up on the walls.’

‘I see. Yes…that was Julia. Another bane of my life. I don’t really have a great deal of success with women – my ex… now Julia. Julia really was the start of all my troubles ten years ago now.’

‘Ten years?’

‘Julia’s older than she looks. She’s in her late twenties.’

‘Really?’

‘She acts and dresses like a teenager. I confess I worry about her, psychologically speaking. She’s just not with us, it’s as if she’s on another planet.’

‘How did you meet?’

‘She was an employee at the factory. A low-skilled job…a secretarial job, but she seemed to latch herself onto me…speak to me on any pretext…sending notes to my wife. Telling Sadie that she, Julia, and I were to be married. Really set the cat among the pigeons. My ex – my wife – call her my ex, but we were not divorced. I’ll have to start calling her my late wife now – anyway, Sadie. Once that seed of suspicion grew, it grew to something mammoth. A bit like a mustard tree. A small seed grows into a huge tree. So we drifted apart and I had my affairs, but definitely not with little Miss Julia Patton, though she continued to shadow me.’

‘Do you know where she lives?’

‘Tang Hall Estate, Two Cheviot Avenue. Seen the address often enough on the letters she has sent to me. Sorry, you are…?’

‘DCs Pharoah and Markov. In case you should want to contact us – you may need a contact person – we’re working the six a.m. until two p.m. shift this week.’

‘Overtime, then.’ Winner glanced at the grandfather clock. It was two-thirty p.m.

‘Par for the course,’ Markov said, smiling.

Pharoah and Markov drove back to York, through the city centre and out to Tang Hall: low-rise, unkempt gardens, houses with boarded-up windows, motorcycles fastened to lamp posts with massive chains and padlocks, cars in driveways being ‘done up’ prior to resale for a modest profit. Number 2 Cheviot Avenue fitted into the surrounding area, an overgrown garden and a pile of uncollected domestic refuse by the side door. The cops knocked at the front door. The sound of the knocker echoed within.

‘I don’t know why we are here,’ said Pharoah.

‘Because we are,’ Markov replied. ‘We’re here to find what we shall find, if anything.’

The door was flung open and a woman with ginger hair and glazed blue eyes stood on the threshold. ‘Yes?’

‘Julia Patton?’

‘Aye.’ At close hand she did indeed look older than she did from a distance.

‘Police.’

An intake of breath. ‘Yes?’

‘We understand that you know Mr Winner? Mr Max Winner?’

‘Aye.’ She smiled. The name clearly triggered something and she said, ‘Winner by name, winner by nature.’

“You know him well?’

‘Very. Very well indeed.’

‘Where were you last night?’

‘Here,’ she said. ‘At home.’

‘All night?’

‘Yes.’

‘Alone?’

‘Yes.’ She adopted a more aggressive stance. ‘You can ask my neighbours. They’ll tell you my light was on all night, go and ask them.’

‘You’ll know Mrs Winner?’

‘The cow. Of course I know her. She tried to stop me and Max…but she couldn’t. True love will find a way.’

‘You and Mr Winner are in a relationship?’

‘Yes…for years now.’

‘Do you hike?’

‘What?’

‘Walking…long walks in the country, do you do it?’

‘No.’

‘You wouldn’t have any hiking socks, then?’

Julia Patton blushed a deep red but recovered quickly and said, ‘No.’

‘Do you mind if we come in?’

‘Why? There’s nothing to see.’

‘Nothing to hide then, have you?’ The cops stepped outside.

Julia Patton’s house was threadbare and basic. Very basic. Worn-out chairs, no floor covering, and even at that time of the year, it had a chill about it. In the hallway Markov noted a pair of boots. Not hiking boots, but working boots, the sort that would have to be worn with thick socks over ordinary socks. He said, ‘I’ve got a pair of boots like that. Use them for gardening.’

‘Oh.’

‘Have to wear hiking socks with them.’

‘I do, too. They wore out. I threw them out.’

‘They’ll be in the refuse by the door.’

‘No. Threw them out a long time ago.’

Markov picked up one of the boots and examined the sole. The soil trapped on the side was slightly damp. ‘They’ve been worn recently?’

‘Just in the garden. Don’t need thick socks to go into the garden. Will that be all?’

Markov replaced the boot. ‘Yes. For now.’

‘Good. I’ve got plans to make.’

‘For?’

‘My marriage. Max and I are getting married. Nothing to stop us now she’s dead. Heard it on the lunchtime news. Haven’t felt better for years.’

That evening went as planned for Carmen Pharoah and Simon Markov; one recently arrived in York, the other settled but recently divorced, and now having found each other. They met outside the Minster and went on a Ghost Walk to satisfy Carmen Pharoah’s curiosity, she having often seen such walks advertised. They joined a crowd of about fifty who were led around the city by an actor in Victorian dress who took them down the narrow, one-person-at-a-time snickleways, a street pattern within a street pattern, and who showed them the tall house where a hundred years previously a little girl had fallen to her death within, down the stairwell from the upper floor to the cellar, and who can sometimes be seen as she ascends the stairs for the last time. And they were shown the window where the most recently seen ghost in all England – about twenty sightings a year – is to be viewed; a little girl sobbing at the window. The story being that during the Black Death her parents noticed she had the symptoms of the plague and so locked her in her room and fled, not just the house, which they locked and left with the sign of the plague on the door, but York itself. Leaving their daughter to succumb to thirst, or starvation, or the plague. And they viewed the house where once a man had seen a column of Roman soldiers who were marching, as if on their knees, along the hallway of the house. Excavation revealed the house had been built on the site of a Roman road, the surface of which was two feet beneath the floor of the house.

‘Lost something by doing the walk in summer,’ Markov said as he glanced at the menu in the Green Jade restaurant.

‘We could do it again,’ replied Carmen, whose eye was caught by the chicken chow mein. ‘A blustery winter’s night, or Halloween. That would be fun.’

They spent the night at her house, where she was still living largely out of bin liners and cardboard boxes. She had bought ‘within the walls’, having been told that she would never have a problem selling her house if she bought ‘within the walls’ and that night they lay together listening to the Minster bells chime midnight.

Max Winner woke early the next morning, as he did during the summer months, but he remained long in bed, still feeling a sense of whirring confusion in his head. The sense of weight having been lifted from his life was tangible…but yet, strangely, there was a loss, too. He was now finally alone in his house. She was no longer in her room. He didn’t miss her, not at all, but there was a space, a hole where previously there was no hole. He didn’t think her loss would have had such an effect on him, and it surprised him that it did.

He heard the doorbell ring. He levered himself out of bed, wound into his dressing gown, and went down the ancient creaking staircase and answered the door. He gasped in surprise and astonishment.

‘Morning, Max,’ beamed Julia Patton. ‘Did you miss me?’ She stood with two suitcases at her feet. ‘Nothing to stop us now, is there, Max?’

‘No – no -’ He said ‘no’ because he didn’t know what else to say. ‘Won’t you come in?’

They sat in the sitting room where the day previously he had received Carmen Pharoah and Simon Markov. ‘I don’t know what to say,’ he said.

‘I knew you’d be pleased. I used to watch the house almost every evening…got to know her movements… Waited for her on the bridge. I knew she’d stop and give me a mouthful…and she did. Then when she turned away to go back to her car, I hit her over the head. I had a rock inside a sock. She went down slowly. I tried to lift her over the parapet, but I couldn’t, so I dragged her down some steps and put her in the water, face down, dropped her handbag in after her and chucked the rock and sock in the water as well. So we can be together now, Max, I can be lady of this house.’

‘Yes…’ He smiled. ‘Yes…have you breakfasted yet?’

‘No. I came straight here. The police called yesterday but I got rid of them, they won’t be back. Just you and me now, Max.’

Max Winner stood. ‘Well, look, why don’t you make yourself at home.’

‘At home,’ she echoed.

‘I’ll go and get my clothes on and I’ll make us both something to eat.’ He left the room and walked back up the stairs to his bedroom. He closed the door behind him and picked up the telephone by his bed. ‘DC Pharoah or Markov,’ he said when his call was answered. ‘Either will do.’