‘The girl who gave you all that trouble wasn’t your daughter, Colonel,’ Miller said gently. ‘She only looked like her.’

For a long, long moment there was silence and then Colonel Craig said, ‘Thank you for that, Sergeant. And now, if you don’t mind, I’d like you to tell me everything – everything there is to know about this whole sorry affair.’

It didn’t take long, that was the strange thing, and when he had finished, Harriet Craig leaned against the rail crying quietly, her father’s arm about her shoulders.

‘This man Vernon,’ Craig said. ‘He’ll be called as a witness at the inquest?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Is there any possibility of a criminal charge being preferred against him?’

Miller sighed heavily and shook his head. ‘I might as well be honest with you. I don’t hold out much hope.’

‘But he murdered Joanna,’ Harriet Craig cried passionately. ‘Murdered her as surely as if he’d used a gun or a knife.’

‘I know that,’ Miller said. ‘Morally he’s as guilty as any man could be, but the facts are all that matters and this is how it will look in court. Your sister committed suicide. She was pregnant and she was also a drug addict. One witness, Monica Grey, has indicated that someone gave your daughter an injection of heroin at a party at Max Vernon’s after she’d passed out, but even she can’t swear definitely that it was Vernon. She wouldn’t last five minutes on the stand with the kind of counsel he’d bring in. Another thing, this isn’t a criminal matter at the moment. All she’s done is give me a general verbal statement that she might change completely once she’s on the stand.’

‘But Vernon was responsible,’ Harriet said. ‘He was responsible for everything. You believe that yourself.’

‘Proving it is something else again.’

There was another long silence and then Craig said, ‘There’s just one thing I don’t understand. Joanna did everything she could to conceal her identity before she killed herself. Why would she do that?’

‘Do you really want me to answer that, colenel?’

‘More than anything else in the world.’

‘All right. I’d say she did it for you.’

The expression on Craig’s face didn’t alter. ‘Please go on.’

‘In those final moments, I think she must have been thinking more clearly than she had for a long time. She’d let you down enough. She didn’t want to shame you any more. I think she wanted the river to swallow her up as if she’d never been.’

When Craig replied, only the slightest of tremor disturbed the even tenor of his voice. ‘Thank you, Sergeant. Somehow I thought it might be something like that.’

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