In a major inquiry a person who comes to the attention of the police as part of that inquiry is listed on HOLMES as a nominal. Any task that an investigating officer decides needs doing is called an action. Actions are prioritized and put on a list and officers are assigned to carry them out. Actions lead to more nominals and more actions and the whole investigation quickly becomes a whirling vortex of information from which there seems no escape. HOLMES lets you do word searches and comparison tests, but half the time that just leads to more actions and more nominals and more items of information. Deal with this for any length of time and you start to get nostalgic for the good old days when you just found a suspect you thought looked a bit tasty and beat out a confession with a phone book.

Background checks on the Oxford University names had a low priority, so I started with the Police National Computer to at least see if any of them had criminal records and to nab likenesses from their driver’s licenses. This was not a quick process but at least it meant I was still awake and dressed when Stephanopoulis called me at one in the morning.

“Grab your overnight bag,” she said. “I’ll be picking you up in ten minutes.”

I didn’t have an overnight bag, so I grabbed my gym bag and hoped that nobody asked me to a formal dinner while I was away. I bunged a spare airwave in with my backup laptop just to be on the safe side. To save time, I went out the side door and walked up Bedford Place to Russell Square. It was drizzling and the moisture put yellow halos around the streetlamps.

Stephanopoulis wouldn’t have called me out of hours for anything less than another murder, and the overnight bag said it was out of London.

I heard it coming before I saw it, a black Jaguar XJ with twenty-inch wheels and, unmistakably from the sound, a supercharged V8 engine. From the way it pulled up it was obvious that the driver had been on all the courses I hadn’t been on and was clearly authorized to drive insanely fast.

The back passenger door opened and I slipped into the smell of newly liveried leather seats to find Stephanopoulis waiting for me. The car took off as soon as the door closed and I found myself slipping around on the backseat until I managed to wrestle my seat belt into place.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“Norwich,” said Stephanopoulis. “Our friend’s been grazing again.”

“Dead?”

“Oh yes,” said the man in the front passenger seat. “Quite dead.” Stephanopoulis introduced him as Detective Chief Inspector Zachary Thompson.

“People call me Zack,” he said as he shook my hand.