Far too simple is the answer. And far too seductive. Under normal circumstances, I’d counsel caution in my son’s dealings with Sylvester Penny. Malo definitely needs a sense of direction in his life, especially if Clemmie really has gone, but there are a number of questions I’d like answered about Sylvester’s take on venture funding. Is this his own enterprise? Does a market really exist for Doomsday yachts? And what, exactly, is he offering the likes of Amit Iyengar?

I’m half awake, trying to tease some kind of order into this muddle of half-remembered clues from last night, when the phone rings. I roll over in bed and check the time. 04.49.

‘Hello? Enora?’

It’s Evelyn. She sounds out of breath. She’s having trouble getting words in the right order.

‘It’s Christianne,’ she says finally. ‘She’s gone.’

‘Gone?’

‘Disappeared.’

She tells me that she woke in the middle of the night to a revolving blue light outside in the street. From the window of her bedroom, she watched McFaul get out of a police car. With an officer beside him, he let himself into the bungalow. They must have been inside for maybe fifteen minutes, then the pair of them reappeared and got back in the car before driving off. Puzzled, Evelyn wondered whether to phone Christianne to make sure she was all right, but when she tried the number – a landline – there was no answer.

‘So, what did you do?’

‘I went back to bed. Maybe half an hour later, there was a knock at the door. It was still dark, about an hour ago, just gone four.’

‘And?’

‘It was Andy. He said that he and the police and God knows who else had been looking for Christianne all night. You know how she sometimes likes to swim last thing in the day? She’d gone down to the beach as usual but didn’t come back. Andy got worried and went to look for her. Her favourite spot’s along towards where the river comes out. That’s where he found her clothes.’

‘On the beach?’

‘Yes. With a towel and trackie bottoms and that cagoule of hers.’

McFaul, she said, had walked back along the beach, thinking she might have got into trouble and been swept along by the current, but found no sign. A couple of people had been out with their dogs. One of them knew Christianne by sight but hadn’t seen her.

‘Does she always swim alone?’

‘In the evening, yes. Earlier, first thing, no.’

‘Was there any …’ I’m trying to avoid the word, but can’t. ‘Note?’

‘Not on the beach, no.’

‘In the house?’

‘Yes. That’s why they were knocking on my door. It was in an envelope, this note. It had your name on, my lovely. It was for you.’