‘Yes, Norman,’ he replied. ‘But if he’d had the presence of mind to wrap up the body parts carefully, in my thinking that doesn’t square with the seemingly careless way he’d disposed of the knife – if that is in fact what he did.’

He saw the Financial Investigator trying to attract his attention.

‘Emily?’

‘Sir,’ Denyer said, ‘as we already know, the house in Nevill Road is owned by Eden Paternoster. We found out that a year ago she paid off the mortgage, but does he know that? It looks like she used the income she had built up from her rental properties. I’ve now discovered two things of interest late this afternoon. The first is, just ten weeks ago, she raised a seventy per cent mortgage on the house of £420,000, from the Lothian Bank of Commerce. And secondly, possibly even more significant, six weeks ago she transferred that entire amount to a nominee account in the Cayman Islands. I am awaiting more information from the Land Registry but I doubt Niall is aware of any of this.’

Grace felt a beat of excitement at this new information. Am I being set up here? he began to wonder. Have I missed something? Niall Paternoster was having an affair with Eden’s boss. Had she suspected her husband and placed the tracker under their car? Or did she hire someone to do it? Did she suspect he might be about to divorce her, so she’d moved all the assets she could overseas? And, holding down a senior job in IT in a major international company, she was clearly tech savvy.

He thought back to the chessboard, with the game in progress in the Paternosters’ living room. Roy Grace’s grandfather had taught him chess when he was about seven, and he’d played often with him, and also occasionally with his dad – until his father stopped playing with him because he always beat his old man too easily.

Chess was about strategy. Thinking as many moves ahead as you could. The fact that both Niall and Eden played chess against each other indicated both were strategists. Was Eden Paternoster still alive? Who was out-thinking the other here in a game beyond the board?

83

Friday 6 September

Addressing his team, Roy Grace said, ‘I want to run a parallel line of enquiry, looking at the possibility Eden Paternoster is not dead and has set this whole thing up – and if so, why?’

‘Could she have done this to get her husband locked up on a murder charge, boss?’ Glenn Branson said.

‘On the face of it, that would seem the most likely,’ Grace agreed. ‘Maybe she planted the blood-spotted T-shirt, hid her rings in a place they would be found, took items of clothing to the forest? Far-fetched? Maybe, but an angry, hurt partner in a relationship is capable of going to any lengths to hit back.’ He continued, ‘But we should consider this might only be a smokescreen and there’s another motive behind it. I want to stress these are only hypotheses and I don’t want to deflect our complete focus away from the current lines of enquiry. So I’m going to divide our resources.’