‘Oh, he didn’t use a rope,’ the constable replied, lacking the reserve and confidentiality of his chief inspector. ‘He hanged himself with his belt.’

Poor Gary, I thought.

But how did anyone hang someone else with a belt if the victim wasn’t a willing participant? Human beings are heavy and lifting one high enough to get a suspended belt round the neck was difficult for just one other person, if not totally impossible. Especially if the belt was fairly short, as would have been the case with Gary, because he hadn’t put on a huge amount of weight since his riding days.

Did that mean that there had to have been more than one assassin?

But I also knew that some suicides hang themselves without being totally suspended. Serial killer Fred West had killed himself in his prison cell by simply putting a makeshift blanket-strip ligature round his neck, attaching it to a window catchment and sinking to his knees. And the actor and comedian Robin Williams had been found hanging in a seated position with his legs firmly on the floor. He had also used his belt, wedging the far end of it between the door and the frame of his wardrobe.

‘Had Mr Bremner been standing on a chair?’ I asked, nonchalantly. ‘One that he then kicked over?’

The policeman looked at me briefly via his rear-view mirror and, like many people, he couldn’t resist telling something that he knew and I didn’t.

‘He hadn’t been standing on anything. He was just slumped face down with the belt tight around his neck. The other end was attached to a tree.’

So Gary could have been strangled first by a third party, who then just hung his body half up by his belt round his neck to make it look like suicide. Surely the police wouldn’t be fooled by that. But would they? For my money, they seemed to be giving far too much credence to the existence of the suspect suicide note.

We arrived at my blue Discovery and I extricated myself from the back seat of the constable’s car.

‘And keep off the Swine Cross,’ he ordered.

‘I know. Your boss already told me.’

The policeman indicated that I should climb into my Discovery and drive away. But I decided not to.

‘I’m going to visit the castle,’ I told him, and I walked off in that direction.

In the fifteenth century, Middleham Castle had been one of the most palatial residences in England, but centuries of neglect have left it as just a shell of its former glory—not that the ruins themselves are not still impressive, now under the protection of English Heritage.

I paid my entrance money and spent half an hour wandering around trying to imagine what the place had looked like in its heyday, when grand royal banquets had been prepared in the huge ground-floor kitchen for service in the great hall above.