‘Sorry, Spence. This could be a huge breakthrough. But I don’t think there’s anything we can do tonight. I’ll be back in the station first thing.’

‘OK, I’ll see you then.’

Jane replaced the receiver. Surely it was too much of a coincidence. But then coincidences do happen. She took another slug of whisky, feeling energized. She went over to her briefcase to look at one of the leaflets Harry Bellamy had left in the incident room. It listed the locations and times of his lectures. Bellamy was at Liverpool and she reckoned he might still be there. She called the contact number on the leaflet, which was the box office line for bookings. It rang for a considerable time before it was eventually answered. Jane asked if Mr. Bellamy was still lecturing and was told that he had just finished. She then gave her name and home phone number, saying that it was urgent that Mr. Bellamy contact her that evening. Replacing the receiver, she lit her second cigarette of the night.

It was a while before the phone rang. She knew it was Bellamy by his deep-toned voice. He obviously recalled who Jane was, even though she had not given her rank.

‘Are you all right?’ he asked.

‘Yes, I’m fine, and grateful to you for returning my call. I need to run something by you. When you gave a talk in the incident room, there was something you said, which I wondered if you could just clarify for me? You said that you doubted the murder of Charles Foxley had been committed by someone connected to his work because the atrocities were rage-driven, so that would rule out, for example, the designer Sebastian Martinez, suggested as a suspect by DI Miller before we learned Martinez had killed himself six months prior—’ Before Jane finished, Bellamy was laughing.

‘That DI Miller is an interesting man. The night before we were brought in to give a briefing, I had shown Miller my notes and had handed him my slides. I didn’t realize he would take it upon himself to actually use them! But that’s par for the course, I guess. My intention was to highlight that there is a difference between rage motivated by revenge and simple anger. That kind of rage can become obsessive and involve inflicting as much pain as possible – which is why I did not believe the murder had been committed by someone close to Foxley, or even in his industry.’

Jane had grabbed her telephone notepad and was scribbling as fast as she could. ‘Can you give me an example, Mr. Bellamy, of the type of person capable of committing that kind of act?’

Bellamy covered the mouthpiece for a moment and Jane could hear him talking to someone, saying that he wasn’t going to be long.