‘Neat,’ I agree.

He pours two glasses, slides one across to me, and proposes a toast.

‘She was an incredible woman,’ he says softly. ‘And nothing any of us can do will ever bring her back.’

McFaul and I spend the rest of the day together. A second brandy follows the first but after that he caps the bottle and suggests we go out. We head down towards the seafront, pausing en route to buy a big bag of chips. Both of us, it turns out, are famished.

Walking through the town centre, to my surprise, McFaul appears to know as many people as Christianne. Most of them are tradesmen, middle-aged or younger, buried in the back of a white van or working high on a scaffold. Word has gone round about Christianne, and McFaul accepts condolence after gruff condolence with a grunt and a nod of the head.

‘They’ll find her,’ murmurs a pensioner emerging from the bakery. ‘Bet your life on it.’

At the car park, we head for the incident van. Instead of the icy Inspector Hollick, another officer has taken charge. He’s older, voluble, slightly overweight, and introduces himself as Paul Bevan. He has a light Welsh accent and seems nerveless in the face of near-impossible odds. Had Madame Beaucarne really gone swimming, he agrees, then the outlook would be grim. The water might still be warm, and it’s a glorious day, but even so there are limits to survival time in the English Channel.

‘You think she never went in? Never left the beach?’ McFaul asks.

‘I’m saying I don’t know, can’t be sure. We’re into elimination here, Mr McFaul. We’ve had the lifeboat out all night, and the police chopper was up at first light. With infra-red, even deceased, we’d still find her. The guys who understand these things have plotted the tidal flows. We have eyes on the clifftops, blokes on the beach clear round to Straight Point. Agreed, she might have taken weights into the water, stones from the beach say, but if that was the case she’d have gone under close in. As I understand it, high tide last night was around the time you found her clothes. In which case her body would have washed up later. So …’ He nods towards the beach. ‘Maybe she wasn’t swimming at all.’

Headquarters, he’s glad to report, have allotted a couple of extra officers to the search, and with their help his team are moving from beach hut to beach hut, and combing gardens along the seafront, in case – for whatever reason – Ms Beaucarne has chosen to hide herself away.

‘But why would she do that?’ McFaul again.