‘Mrs Nyman’s husband, 33-year-old Philip Nyman, said at the couple’s home in Flask Walk, Hampstead, today, “My wife and I had just got back from a motoring holiday in Italy and Yugoslavia. On the following morning Iris went out shopping and never returned. I am frantic with worry. She seemed to be happy and relaxed.”

‘Mr Woodhouse’s company, of which Mrs Nyman is a director, was this year involved in a vast takeover bid as a result of which two other major clothing firms were absorbed into Sunsports Ltd. The company’s turnover last year was in the region of £100,000,000.’

There was a photograph of Iris Nyman in black glasses. Wexford would have been hard put to it to say whether this was of the woman on the walls or the woman in Mirna.

That night they gave Racic a farewell dinner at the Dubrovacka restaurant.

‘Don’t say what they all say, Reg, that you will come back next year. Dalmatia is beautiful to you and Gospoda Wexford now, but a few days and the memory will fade. Someone will say, San Marino for you next time, or Ibiza, and there you will go. Is it not so?’

‘I said I shall be back,’ said Wexford, ‘and I meant it.’ He raised his glass of Posip. ‘But not in a year’s time. It’ll be sooner than that.’

Three hundred and sixty-two days sooner, as Racic pointed out.

‘And here I am, sitting in the vrt of your kucica!’

‘Reg, we shall have you fluent in Serbo-Croat yet.’

‘Alas, no. I must be back in London again tomorrow night.’

They were in Racic’s garden, halfway up the terraced hill behind Mirna, sitting in wicker chairs under his vine and his fig tree. Pink and white and red oleanders shimmered in the dusk, and above their heads bunches of small green grapes hung between the slats of a canopy. On the table was a bottle of Posip and the remains of a dinner of king prawns and Dalmatian buttered potatoes, salad and bread and big ripe peaches.

‘And now we have eaten,’ said Racic, ‘you will please tell me the tale of the important business that brought you back to Mirna so pleasantly soon. It concerns Mr and Mrs Nyman?’

‘Ivo, we shall have you a policeman yet.’

Racic laughed and re-filled Wexford’s glass. Then he looked serious. ‘Not a laughing matter, I think, not pleasant.’

‘Far from it. Iris Nyman is dead, murdered, unless I am much mistaken. This afternoon I accompanied the Dubrovnik police out into the bay and we took her body out of the cave on Vrapci.’

‘Zaboga! You cannot mean it! That girl who was at the Bosnia and who came out with her husband in my boat?’

‘Well, no, not that one. She’s alive and in Athens from where, I imagine, she’ll be extradited.’

‘I don’t understand. Tell me the tale from the beginning.’

Wexford leaned back in his chair and looked up through the vines at the violet sky where the first stars had begun to show. ‘I’ll have to start with the background,’ he said, and after a pause, ‘Iris Nyman was the daughter and only child of James Woodhouse, the chairman of a company called Sunsports Ltd which makes sports- and beachwear and has a large export trade. She married when she was very young, less than twenty, a junior salesman in her father’s firm. After the marriage Woodhouse made a director of her, settled a lot of money on her, bought her a house and gave her a company car. To justify her company fees and expenses, she was in the habit of annually making a trip to holiday resorts in Europe with her husband, ostensibly to wear Sunsports clothes and note who else was wearing them, and also to study the success of rival markets. Probably, she simply holidayed.