‘Pretty much the same story we already know,’ Patrick replied. ‘Zaid said Vale could be weird around Beatrix. Not aggressive as such, more …’ It sounded like he was grimacing, sucking in breath through his teeth. ‘I don’t know, he just used the word “weird”. Like, Vale would try to talk to Beatrix when she was in the middle of talking to someone else; or he’d follow her around. But, then, I also managed to track down a couple of the other people who did that Politics postgrad and they told me Vale was a bit of a loner but was relatively harmless.’

‘Do you think Vale was in love with Beatrix?’

‘He could have been, yeah.’

‘But the police saw it more as an obsession?’

‘Well, Smoulter definitely did.’

‘Okay,’ the woman said. ‘What else did you find out?’

‘Well, as I mentioned, I got in touch with this Robert Zaid guy last week, and, after finally getting his PA to actually do her job properly, the two of us ended up talking over Skype a couple of days later. He’s still down in London; lives in Highgate. He works in the Foreign Office as some kind of diplomat, which he’s been doing for years, although I’ve no idea why: his dad was Iranian and made tons of money from oil back in the seventies, so Zaid was already “don’t have to work” rich. After his parents died, he used his inheritance to invest in a load of Internet start-ups, and now he’s not just rich, he’s Sunday Times Rich List rich – which is why I guess it was hard to pin him down.’

I thought of the money I’d found in the room at Seiger and Sten, and tried to force a connection between Jacob Pierce and Robert Zaid – an easy explanation for how hundreds of thousands of pounds had come into Pierce’s possession. But Zaid had been an irrelevance up until now, a minor side story, and it was Adrian Vale, not Zaid, who had an established connection with Jacob Pierce, using him as his solicitor when he’d been pulled in for questioning after Beatrix vanished. Being wealthy and then knowing Beatrix Steards weren’t the same things as buying Jacob Pierce’s silence and then abducting and killing someone, and on a postgrad, at a good university like King’s College, and in one of the world’s most expensive cities, Zaid wasn’t likely to be the only student who came from money. In fact, it was just as probable now that the postgrad was a redundant line of enquiry – not least because the woman on the tape had already admitted to killing Beatrix.