Jolly might have been his name, but jolly he certainly was not. He was a thin, dyspeptic man with a face like a prune and a nature as sour as a lemon. He had a way of authorising the payment of claims as though the money was coming out of his own pocket, which was probably not a bad trait for a man in his job.

He looked up as I walked in and said irascibly, ‘Where the devil have you been? I’ve been trying to find you for hours.’

I did not have to account to Jolly for the way I spent my time so I ignored that and said, ‘What’s your problem?’

‘A man called David Salton has died.’

That didn’t surprise me. People are always dying and you hear of the fact more often in an insurance office than in most other places. I sat down.

‘How much is he into you for?’

‘Half a million of personal insurance.’

That was enough to make even me wince: God knows what it was doing to Jolly’s ulcer.

‘What’s the snag?’

He tried – and failed – to suppress the look of pain on his face. ‘This one is all snag. Salton first came to us twenty-five years ago and took out £10,000 worth of insurance on his life. Over the years he built it up to a quarter-million. Just over a year ago he suddenly doubled it; the reason he gave was galloping inflation.’

‘So on the last quarter-million he only paid two premiums,’ I observed. I could see what was needling Jolly: the company was going to lose badly on this one. ‘How old was Salton?’

‘Fifty-two.’

‘Who gets the loot?’

‘I imagine it will be the widow,’ said Jolly. ‘The terms of his will aren’t known yet. The thing that bothers me is the way he died. He was found dead in a small boat fifteen miles from land.’

‘Alone?’

‘Yes.’

I looked past him out of the window at the snowflakes drifting from a leaden London sky. ‘I assume there was an inquest? What did the coroner say?’

‘Death from natural causes. The medical certificate states a heart attack.’ Jolly grimaced. ‘That might be debatable. The body was badly decomposed.’

‘Decomposed? How long had he been out there?’

‘Four days. But it wasn’t so much the time as the heat.’

I stared at Jolly. ‘What heat?’

‘Oh, it happened in the Caribbean,’ he said, as though I ought to have known. ‘Salton’s boat was found off the island of Campanilla – he lived there.’

I sighed. Jolly’s problem was making him incoherent. ‘What about starting at the beginning?’ I suggested. ‘And then tell me what you’d like me to do.’