“It certainly sounds a possibility,” Sophie said. “But what about your murder investigation? Isn’t it possible that someone connected with that has been tailing you, waiting for an opportunity to strike?”

Lindsay sighed. “It’s not very likely, given that I seem to have hit a brick wall. Unless there’s something in Penny’s last draft to point me in a different direction, I’m stuck. I can no more prove Meredith innocent than I can show someone else is guilty. Helen’s probably right. Most likely it was Guy.”

“You’ve got to go to the police,” Helen said firmly.

“No way. That’s the very last thing I should do,” Lindsay said wearily.

“You can’t let him get away with this,” Kirsten chipped in as she braked for a pedestrian crossing. “He could try again, and next time he might really hurt somebody.”

“It’s not worth it. He didn’t actually hit me. All this,” she said, fluttering her fingers in the direction of her face, “was incidental. I doubt he’d even get a custodial sentence. No, the revenge I’ve got lined up for Guy and Stella is going to hurt them a lot more than a something or nothing charge in a magistrates’ court. And to make it work, the last thing we want to be doing is explaining why I was in Watergaw’s car park the wrong side of midnight.”

“This sounds devious,” Sophie commented.

“You haven’t heard the half of it,” Helen said ominously.

“And you don’t want to, either,” Kirsten chipped in. “I had it over dinner and then all the way to Heathrow. Believe me, Sophie, this is one case where ignorance is bliss.”

“I’ll tell you later, Soph. Suffice it to say, Guy turned out to be a real shyster, so I’ve been fitting him up good style,” Lindsay said. “But I need to brief you now, Helen. If you go into my backpack, you’ll find a document wallet with three printed memos in it.” As Sophie passed the bag over and Helen unzipped it, Lindsay continued. “First thing in the morning, you go to your local VAT office and request an interview with an investigator. Failing that, you want the inspector who deals with Watergaw. You tell him you had been told that one of your staff had been using your computer to run their own business on the side, so you were doing a file audit. While you were in there, you found these memos in the private desks of your business partners.”

Helen was skimming the documents as she listened. “Jesus!” she exploded. “This is dynamite. You don’t take prisoners, do you?”

“And that was presumably written before your colleague tried to cave her head in,” Sophie said drily. “Probably just as well. If she was framing him now, she’d not be satisfied with anything less than serial murder.”