‘Yes it has! He might know where it’s got to. He might even have it himself.’

‘I think I’d have seen it in his room if he’d nabbed it when he was seven,’ said Georgie.

‘Well, I’m going to ring him,’ said Cass.

‘Be my guest,’ said Georgie, cross now. Cass was the one who’d grabbed everything. She should have taken care of it.

Cass suddenly felt suspicious about Jake having wanted the trefoil table which the medals had been housed in. Maybe he’d asked for the table because he already had the medal? But she found it maddeningly difficult to get hold of Jake. He had an assistant and his assistant had an assistant, too.

They weren’t even all that polite, these people. She’d rung more than once. Mr Newhouse would call her back, they said. When at last he did ring – they were in the middle of supper, by then – Cass came straight to the point: had he got the medal? And if not, did he recall where it had been when he last saw it? But he hadn’t and he couldn’t.

‘But you’ve got the table, haven’t you? The display table they used to be kept in?’ said Cass.

‘Yes, I have. It looks really nice, actually. I’ve got it in the hallway at my flat. Emma put some of her crystals in there.’ Emma was his girlfriend.

‘Can you look and just make sure it didn’t somehow get underneath the velvet?’

‘Sure,’ said Jake. ‘Hold on, I’ll go and look now. But I really doubt it.’

And he was right, it wasn’t there.

The next day Adam telephoned the insurance people. No, Celia had not claimed against it; nor would Cass and Adam be eligible to do so, since an item of that value would’ve had to have been listed separately. It wouldn’t be insured under their general household contents policy.

‘It was always just kept up on the third floor in a sort of case they had,’ Adam said, pointlessly.

‘Well, nowadays, with an item of that value, we’d have insisted that it be kept securely. In a safe or bank vault. These days we usually ask clients to install home safes, somewhere discreet. In some of our older houses there was a safe in plain view, but we don’t like to make it that easy for potential burglars. The difficulty always is, with something like a medal or a coin – even a piece of jewellery – it’s all too easy to remove undetected. When did you say you’d seen it last?’

‘My wife is fairly sure it was there at the time of her mother’s death,’ said Adam, even though Cass had never said anything of the sort.

‘So it could have been taken at any time, really.’

‘Yes, but that doesn’t help us much,’ said Adam.