Richie ran a thumb through the bank statements again, came to rest on that pathetic last page. “Jesus,” he said, shaking his head.

“Straight-up guy, wife and kids, good job, got his house and his life just the way he likes them; then out of the blue, hey presto, it’s crumbling around his ears. His job’s gone, his car’s gone, his house is going—for all we know, Jenny could have been planning to leave him now that he wasn’t providing, take the kids with her. That could have been what pushed him over the edge.”

“All in less than a year,” Richie said. He put the bank statements down on the bed next to the HomeTime letters, holding them between his fingertips like they were radioactive. “Yeah. That could do it, all right.”

“We’ve still got plenty of ifs on the table. But if Larry’s lads don’t find any evidence of an outsider, and if the weapon turns up somewhere accessible, and if Jenny Spain doesn’t wake up and give us a very plausible story about how someone other than her husband did this … This case could be over a lot sooner than we were expecting.”

That was when my phone rang again.

“And there you go,” I said, fishing it out of my pocket. “How much do you want to bet this is one of the floaters to say we’ve got the weapon, somewhere nice and close?”

It was Marlboro Man, and he was so excited his voice was cracking like a teenager’s. “Sir,” he said. “Sir, you need to see this.”

*

He was in Ocean View Walk, the double line of houses—you couldn’t exactly call it a street—between Ocean View Rise and the water. The other floaters’ heads popped out of gaps in walls as we passed, like curious animals’. Marlboro Man waved to us from a second-floor window.

The house had got as far as walls and roof, gray blocks heavy with tangled green creepers. The front garden was chest-high weeds and gorse, crowding up the drive and in at the empty doorway. We had to climb the rusted scaffolding, shaking creepers off our feet, and swing ourselves through a window-hole.

Marlboro Man said, “I wasn’t sure whether to … I mean, I know you were busy, sir, but you said to call you if we found anything that could be interesting. And this …”

Someone had, carefully and over plenty of time, turned the top floor of the house into his own private lair. A sleeping bag, one of the serious ones meant for semi-professional wilderness expeditions, weighted down at the bottom with a rough lump of concrete. Thick plastic sheeting tacked over the window-holes, to keep out the wind. Three two-liter bottles of water, neatly lined up against a wall. A clear plastic storage tub just big enough for a stick of Right Guard, a bar of soap, a washcloth, a toothbrush and a tube of toothpaste. A dustpan and brush in one clean corner: no spiderwebs here. A supermarket bag holding another chunk of concrete, a couple of empty Lucozade bottles, a crumple of chocolate wrappers and a sandwich crust sticking out of squashed tinfoil. One of those plastic rain hoods that old women wear, hung on a nail in a beam. And a pair of black binoculars, lying on top of the sleeping bag next to their battered case.