‘I’ll make a copy of it for you, but I’ll need to keep the original as evidence in the investigation.’

After they had driven back to the station, Spencer went into the canteen and grabbed two rather stale cheese sandwiches and two mugs of tea to take into the boardroom. Jane was having the first look through the coveted diary and by the time he joined her she had already made extensive notes.

‘I don’t know how this man functioned with a secretary who was so dizzy,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘There is more whiteout in here than there is paper. Some of the pages are clogged with it when he has appointments, breakfast meetings, coffee meetings, lunches . . . but on the days when he was obviously visiting the dominatrix, it just says “family matter”. There’s a lot of scrawled writing, which I presume is his. “Toadying with FFA”. I wonder who FFA is,’ Jane said, turning the pages.

Spencer grinned. ‘FFA means Fickle Fucking Actor.’

Jane rolled her eyes. ‘Well, he certainly has a lot of meetings with them.’

Together Jane and Spencer went through the diary page by page, noting that Julia had covered over some entries. Perhaps because she’d run out of whiteout, she had glued on little bits of paper and written ‘cancelled’ or ‘do not include’.

There were numerous flights back and forth to LA and New York, and on one page, in Foxley’s red scrawl, was ‘got him’ underlined several times, but nothing else that indicated any confrontations or difficult relationships.

Spencer stood up and dug his hands into his pockets. ‘Here is a guy who has a hugely successful business. He represents some of the most famous actors in the UK and in the US. He owns a luxurious flat in Kensington. And he spends an inordinate amount of time in a seedy S&M brothel. It just doesn’t seem to add up.’

Jane nodded. ‘I know what you mean. Paul Lawrence felt there was a lot about his flat that didn’t make any sense either. He had very few clothes there and, for a man who was always going to premieres and opening nights, there were no evening suits or smart shoes, only one pair of rather grubby trainers.’

Spencer began to walk around the boardroom table.

‘He owns the rundown Volvo to move his dogs around, plus he has a flash Jaguar. What we don’t know is what was he doing at the weekends. Where did he go? Did he play golf? What did he do on those blank weekends?’

Jane closed the diary. ‘I think we should get a search warrant for the ex-wife’s house.’

‘Too bloody right! According to DS Lawrence, whoever committed the murder had to have been covered in blood.’

‘Yes, we know that,’ Jane agreed. ‘But we haven’t got the results yet on the footprints which were found in the victim’s blood.’