Tilly couldn’t speak, but she didn’t need to. The woman had hung up. She double-checked that her caller ID was off. Some clever dick might be able to trace the call sometime in the future, but by that point Tilly hoped she’d have got to the bottom of what was happening. Huge companies like Ravensword had the facility to record calls, of course, but she was confident the receptionist wouldn’t have taken that risk.

She sat at her kitchen table staring into space, then reached for her bag. She went out onto the balcony with her cigarettes and lit one shakily before bringing a news site up on her phone. The report about the murders made no mention of Alexandros. What the hell did it mean? George had told her that he was staying in a pal’s pad on some lake up north. She went inside to get her notes, not caring that cigarette smoke followed her. When she first had contact with a source, she wrote everything down, from their favourite takeaway to their pet’s name. It was there: he’d said he’d be staying at Allerdale House, on the shore of Derwent Water, owned by the Montague-Roland family. Christ. Montague-Roland was the name of some lord, she was certain of it. It was the kind of name that, once heard, never went away.

She googled the local news for the Derwent area and found what she was looking for straight away: London man found murdered at Lakes marina. Within a few minutes, she had learned all she needed to know about the death of her new source. A man who’d told her that he’d spent months trying to find the right journalist for the job, and that he was sitting on something that might cause him harm. The article was to be his insurance.

Next she googled Montague-Roland. A photograph of a slimy-looking City type came up, alongside one of a much older man. The older man had died late last year; the slimeball was his grandson and heir. She clicked on related searches and learned that Sebastian Montague-Roland intended to create a leisure empire out of the pile on the shores of Derwent Water, and that building work was due to start soon. She also read of the recent burglary, in which hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of items had disappeared from the boathouse. The dates matched: George had been there.

Some story.

Tilly felt her heart rate increase and knew she was on to something.