“Too creepy for you?”

Richie gave me a wry sideways grin. “I managed not to crap my kacks. Even if it’d been quiet, I wanted to be awake. In case.”

“I’d have been the same. How are you doing?”

“All right. A bit wrecked, like, but I’m not gonna crash out halfway through the post-mortem or anything.”

“If we get you a couple of hours’ kip somewhere along the way, can you take another night?”

“Little more of this”—he tilted the coffee cup—“and yeah, sure I can. Same as last night, yeah?”

“No,” I said. “One of the definitions of insanity, my friend, is doing the same thing again and again and hoping for different results. If our man could resist the bait last night, he can resist it tonight. We need better bait.”

Richie’s head turned towards me. “Yeah? I thought ours was pretty decent. Another night or two and I’d say we’ll have him.”

I raised my cup to him. “Vote of confidence appreciated. But the fact is, I misjudged our boy. He’s not interested in us. Some of them can’t stay away from the cops: they insert themselves into the investigation every way they can find, you can’t turn around without tripping over Mr. Helpful. Our guy isn’t like that, or we’d have him by now. He doesn’t give a damn what we do, or what the Bureau lads do. But you know what he’s very interested in, don’t you?”

“The Spains?”

“Ten points for you. The Spains.”

“We haven’t got the Spains, but. I mean, Jenny, yeah, but—”

“But even if Jenny was able to help us out, I want to keep her under wraps for as long as I can. True enough. What we do have, though, is Whatshername, that floater—what is her name?”

“Oates. Detective Janine Oates.”

“Her. You may not have noticed this, but from a distance, in the right context, Detective Oates could quite probably pass for Fiona Rafferty. Same height, same build, same hair—Detective Oates’s is a lot neater, luckily, but I’m sure she could mess it up if we asked her to. Get her a red duffle coat and Bob’s your uncle. It’s not that they’re actually anything alike, but to spot that you’d have to get a proper look, and for that, you’d need a decent vantage point and your binoculars.”

Richie said, “We clear out at six again, she drives up—have we got a yellow Fiat in the pool, yeah?”

“I’m not sure, but if we don’t, we can just have a marked car drop her off. She goes into the house and spends the night doing whatever she thinks Fiona Rafferty would do, as obviously as possible—wandering around looking distraught with the curtains open, having a read of Pat and Jenny’s papers, that kind of thing. And we wait.”

Richie drank his coffee, with an unconscious grimace on each sip, and considered that. “You think he knows who Fiona is?”

“I think there’s a damn good chance he does, yeah. Remember, we don’t know where he came into contact with the Spains; it could have been somewhere that involved Fiona too. Even if it wasn’t, she may not have been out here in a few months, but for all we know he’s been watching them for a lot longer than that.”