As Jane was checking through the money trail, she crossed to Spencer’s last memos on the incident board. He had written: KW possibly being closed, no finances. Jane hurried back to her desk. Checking through her notes, and comparing them to the diary, she noticed that there were several references to KW over a period of time. The initials were often accompanied by names of hotels, such as The Ritz, The Dorchester and The Grosvenor, and there were odd numbers beside them. She then thumbed through the main desk diary in an attempt to match the dates. On four matching dates there had been heavy use of whiteout, blocking out information.

She looked across to Gary Dors, who was thudding out a report on his typewriter about a recent robbery. His use of whiteout was infamous.

‘Gary. Do you know how to lift whiteout off a page? I mean, it’s water-based, isn’t it?’

He picked up his ever-present whiteout bottle and squinted at it. ‘I suppose . . . It’s a bit like a paint, isn’t it?’

‘I was just wondering how to ease it off from paper to see what’s written underneath.’

Dors shrugged. ‘If I were you, I’d experiment – put a few brushes on a blank piece of paper and let it dry. Then see if you can get it off if you wet it. But you better not attempt to do it on any important document because it could destroy the paper.’

‘Thank you for that expertise,’ Jane said, deciding she wouldn’t attempt it. Then she had a thought: the forensic lab sometimes used ESDA, an electrostatic detection apparatus, along with oblique lighting. She remembered that the machine allowed the visualization of obscured writing without damaging the document.

Spencer came in eating a sandwich.

‘My God, the Summers duo are something else. DCI Collins reckons Max is worth over a billion and God knows how much his brother is worth. But both have a confirmed alibi for the night of the murder. That said, they’ve got enough money swirling around to hire someone. Then again, a professional hitman doesn’t usually disembowel his victim and slit their throat. That really is what you’d call overkill.’

Jane was only half listening and tapped him with a pencil. ‘You know you put KW on the incident board?’

‘Yeah, it’s KatWalk, the modelingagency Foxley was running. Mostly, from what I can suss out, it was financed by Foxley himself, as none of the other agents appeared to have any interest in a bunch of unknown teenage models and ex-footballers.’

Jane flicked through the pages of her notebook. ‘Do you think it is possible that’s where Foxley’s cash was going? I’m still missing sixty-odd thousand. I’ve highlighted this over and over again and keep being fobbed off with the idea it was being used for drugs.’

‘That’s a shit lot of drugs,’ Spencer said.