‘He gave me the details of Marine Light Nautical. An old sailing pal of his is keeping his ear to the ground for the antique shell. Also Tilly Knight is with him and she’s been in touch with Alexandros Skarparis. If I can persuade him to go to the military base in Cyprus then we could get him back here, but I haven’t spoken to him yet. Apparently he’s as jittery as she is and he’s gone to a pad in the mountains. I’ll speak to him later. Tilly’s hotel room here has been broken into and I’ve got a description of two men; also her laptop with all her work on George has gone.’

‘What did George tell her?’

‘Nothing that implicates anybody in his death, apart from saying that his research into addiction was valuable to some powerful people. He was testing himself as a lab rat: hence the cocaine in his system.’

‘Anything concrete?’ Matt asked.

‘No.’

Matt rubbed his eyes. Kelly moved on.

‘Will, anything in the financial files of Allerdale House?’ Will Phillips and Rob Shawcross had been given the task of trawling through the late peer’s papers.

‘The payments to George Murphy, and also the running of the Montague Club.’

The Montague Club had popped up when they were trying to find Sebastian. The elite postcode was enough to indicate the value of such a place, which turned out to be a sumptuous private club owned by the Montague-Rolands for decades. Matt had obtained a warrant for a full membership list; however, these private clubs, nestling behind the hustle and bustle of Mayfair, promising anonymity from prying paparazzi, were notoriously secret, and it might take more than simply looking through a register. Some members were probably completely off the record: celebrities and the mega rich, even royals.

‘Does George Murphy strike any of you as the kind of man to hobnob with wealthy men in dinner jackets?’ Kelly asked.

Matt remained silent, watching her. Everyone else shook their heads.

‘Me neither, but it turns out he’s a life member of the Montague Club. As is the CEO of Ravensword, Philip Tooting.’ Kelly brought up Tooting’s photo alongside George’s on the whiteboard. ‘He’s an arrogant man and I’m not letting him off our radar just yet. George I can kind of understand, because he and Lord Allerdale were both champion rowers for Cambridge, though in different decades. From what we can make out about Allerdale, though, he was a bit of a philanthropist, and that’s the opposite of Tooting, who’s about as capitalist as they come. There’s an annual rowing alumni dinner at the club; this year’s was on Wednesday just gone.

She let the information sink in.