“Finally! Here we have it. Contents of stomach: foie gras, turbot, beef Wellington. Three courses. No dessert, it would seem . . . probably watching his waistline. Plenty of wine and a large measure of brandy. Hmm . . . sir?”

“I know what you’re going to ask. How in hell can they specify ‘beef Wellington’ rather than ‘beef stew,’ ‘turbot’ rather than ‘cod’? Well, they can’t, at least not definitively. That’s the doc being helpfully imaginative. For our eyes only, this sheet. The page we actually filed is this one, listing the results item by item and in order of distance travelled down the tubes.” He presented a further sheet bearing the heading of the Cambridge Medical Forensic Department. “Tedious but essential. A list compiled by a forensic scientist of the first order—Beaufort. He identified individual ingredients from the internal gloop and—bon viveur that he is—was able to reconstitute them into a credible menu. Beef in conjunction with the elements of pastry—flour and fat—amounts to beef pie, but when a soupçon of black truffle is also present in the same stratum—well, that’s your beef Wellington.”

MacFarlane replaced the sheets and photographs in Chiqui’s file and selected a second file.

“This one is less spectacular. But it’s not so cold as the one you’ve just seen. Still on the books, in fact. I’ve parked these copies in here because I thought there might be a connection. The murder occurred just before your arrival on the force. I gave it to Inspector Beattie. Poor bloke—he had a lot of interference from me, and even more annoyingly, the War Office. Or a section of it that’s a little bit hush-hush. You’ll see why. Again, we got a good shot of the crime scene before the press were aware and managed to clear up in double-quick time. You’ll appreciate the need for that.”

Redfyre looked carefully at the photographs, again admiring the clear eye and skill of the police photographer. He was looking at a very familiar Cambridge monument, and one much loved by him. A seven-foot-tall figure cast in bronze atop a plinth stood in the middle of the Hills Road at its junction with the short road that led to the railway station. The memorial to the men of Cambridgeshire who fell in the Great War.