‘According to the manager of the hotel in Dubrovnik where the three of them had been staying, Nyman checked out and paid his bill early on the evening of the 19th. Neither of the women was with him. Iris was dead and Anna was at the hairdresser’s, having her hair cut and dyed to the same style and colour as her cousin’s. The police have already found the hairdresser who did the job.’

‘They came here next,’ said Racic. ‘Why didn’t they go straight back to England? And now I must ask, surely they did not intend to play this game in England? Even if the two women, as cousins, to a degree resembled each other, this Anna could not hope to deceive a father, close friends, Mrs Nyman’s neighbours.’

‘The answer to your first question is that to have returned to England a week earlier than expected would have looked odd. Why go back? The weather was perfect. Nyman wanted to give the impression they had both been well and happy during their holiday. No, his idea was to make sufficient people here in Yugoslavia believe that Iris was alive after June 19th. That’s why he latched on to us and got our name and home town out of us. He wanted to be sure of witnesses if need be. Anna was less bold, she was frightened to death. But Philip actually found himself two more English witnesses, though, thanks to your intervention, he never kept the appointment to dine with them.’

‘My intervention?’

‘Your excellent English. And now perhaps you’ll tell me what you overheard in the boat.’

Racic laughed. His strong white teeth gleamed in the lamplight. ‘I knew she was not Mrs Nyman, Reg, but that knowledge would not have helped you then, eh? You had seen the lady on the walls but not, I presume, her marriage document. I thought to myself, why should I tell this busybody of a policeman the secrets of my passengers? But now, to use an idiom, here goes. Reg, the lady said, “I feel so guilty, it is terrible what we have done,” and he replied, “Everyone here thinks you are my wife, and no one at home will suspect a thing. One day you will be and we shall forget all this.” Now, would you have supposed they were talking of murder or of illicit passion?’

Wexford smiled. ‘Nyman must have thought we’d confer, you and I, and jump to the former conclusion. Or else he’d forgotten what he’d said. He has rather a way of doing that.’

‘And after they left?’

‘Anna was to travel on Iris’s passport in the hope it would be stamped at at least one frontier. In fact, it was stamped at two, between Yugoslavia and Italy and again at Calais. At Dover Anna presumably left him and caught the first plane to Athens she could get. Nyman went home, reaching there in the night of the 28th, the precise date on which he and Iris had planned to return. On the following afternoon he told his father-in-law and the police that Iris was missing.’