She made an immediate call back with the dispiriting news that Jude had tried but failed. Rapprochement still had no place on Shannon’s agenda. Carole decided she wouldn’t at this stage tell Malee what had happened to the actual will. Wait until she had talked to Jude about it. The last thing she wanted to do was to generate more bad blood between the widow and Frankie. Nor did she mention the battered green diary that was currently sitting on her kitchen table.

‘Oh,’ said Malee, ‘there is one other thing I have found out since we spoke at the weekend.’

‘What’s that?’

‘I have found that Bill had another bank account.’

‘For the garage?’

‘No. There was an ordinary business account and a savings account for the garage. The same for us at home. I did not want him to set up a joint account for us. I thought that might encourage the family to see me as a gold-digger. But Bill insisted. So, we had the joint account and a savings account. But the new one I have found is different.’

‘How did you find out about it?’

‘A statement came through the post.’

‘You said it was different from the other accounts.’

‘Different bank, for a start. All the others are NatWest. This one’s HSBC, and he only set it up last October.’

‘Nothing to do with the business?’

‘I don’t think it can be. All the activity going through it is transfers of money from the joint account to this new HSBC account, and payments going out of it.’

‘Payments to the same recipients?’

‘There are two different recipients. To one the payment’s always five hundred pounds.’

‘And how regular are they?’

‘Every couple of weeks. Sometimes more often. But there isn’t a pattern. No standing orders or direct debits. Just as and when.’

‘Presumably it says on the statement who these payments are being made to?’

‘Yes. It says “APIPENSION”.’

‘So maybe he did set up a new pension?’

‘It seems unlikely. His pension arrangements were all sorted through a financial adviser Bill had worked with for years. I’ve called the guy in question and he knows nothing about it. And I’ve checked through Bill’s papers. There’s nothing there about an “APIPENSION” – or, I suppose, more likely, an “A.P.I. PENSION”. Nothing.’

‘And what about the other payments? You said there were two recipients.’

‘Yes. There are fewer of the others, but they’re for larger amounts. Two thousand, three thousand, that kind of thing.’

‘And who’s the payee there?’

‘“VADJ Trading”.’

‘Mean anything to you?’

‘No. Needless to say I’ve googled it. Nothing.’

A suspicion was forming in Carole’s mind, but she didn’t want to spell it out. See first in which direction Malee’s thoughts had been moving.

‘So, do you have any thoughts about where the money might have been going?’