‘I’m afraid so,’ said DI Hitchens.

‘Typical. Motive, but no opportunity.’

‘A bit like fish and no chips.’

‘If you say so, Paul.’

‘Do you want the latest news on Martin Stafford?’ asked Hitchens.

‘Fire away.’ When Hitchens and Fry had entered his office, Tailby had been sneaking a crafty smoke of his pipe, to ease the ache in his head from staring at the computer screen. He waved his hand at the cloud of smoke to see the DI better.

‘We’ve been following a bit of a long trail,’ said Hitchens. ‘Diane has the details.’

‘Martin Stafford left Jenny Weston four years ago,’ said Fry. ‘And while the divorce was going on, he left his job too. He moved from the Derby Evening Telegraph to the Leicester Mercury. But he was there only eighteen months, then had a spell on a small weekly in Cheshire. I tracked one of the reporters down there. She said he drank too much, had affairs in office hours, boasted about his talents as a journalist but never bothered to put them to use. He generally seemed to give the impression he was too good for the place.’

‘I can’t say I’m warming to him yet. I don’t suppose he lasted any longer at the Cheshire paper?’

‘Less,’ said Fry. ‘Twelve months. He had a couple of blazing rows with the editor, then announced one day that he was going freelance.’

‘Damn. End of employment trail, then.’

‘His last employers have an address in Macclesfield, so I asked Cheshire to chase him up. But there’s a Punjabi family living there now. Mail still arrives for Stafford, but they just throw it away.’

‘What about the electoral register?’

‘He’s still registered at the Macclesfield address. The register is taken in October, of course.’

‘Is that it, then?’

‘Not quite, sir. I reckoned if he had been trying to set himself up as a freelancer, he ought to have tried some of the bigger papers in the region for work. So I checked with a few, just in case any of them had him on their books. The Features Editor at the Sheffield Star was very helpful and dug out a proposal letter from Martin Stafford from a few months back. The address was a flat in Congleton. That’s as fresh as we’ll get. And it’s not too far away.’

‘Phone number?’

‘Got it, but we haven’t tried it yet,’ said Fry.

‘You think he’s still there?’

DI Hitchens took over. ‘I think if he’s getting no work as a freelance, he’ll either have moved to another area, found some other kind of job entirely, or ended up on the dole. My money’s on the second or third. Because he hasn’t gone far from the district at any time, has he?’

Tailby looked pleased. ‘I think you’re probably right. Have we been in touch with Cheshire again?’