Because it was only being used in high-priority cases at the time, the suicide of a depressed student, his corpse discovered – decomposed and forgotten – at the bottom of a five-hundred-foot cliff face, was never going to make the cut. It appeared open and shut. The victim had a wallet on him, containing ID, there was a half-finished suicide note confirming other personal details, and what hadn’t yet decayed into the shingle bore a striking similarity to Adrian Vale.

Not only were Adrian Vale and Robert Zaid a close match in terms of build – in adulthood, Zaid had filled out, shaking off the boyishness of his youth – Zaid also happened to be, like Vale, olive-skinned, dark-eyed and dark-haired. He was half Iranian, Vale was Latino, but while their roots were thousands of miles apart, their colouring and physiques were nearly identical. The fact that, when investigators found the body, the teeth had been smashed during the fall only helped muddy the waters even more: dental tests proved inconclusive, but inconclusive was exactly what the teeth were going to be when a body hit the floor, face first, at ninety miles per hour.

Having inherited a fortune after his parents’ deaths, Zaid was living the sort of lifestyle that Vale envied and would never have. And so with Vale’s own mother dead by that time, and no other attachments in his life – nothing to draw him back to LA, especially with Joline Kader still sniffing around him – Vale made his move.

He killed Robert Zaid.

And then became him.

It was why Vale drifted away from anyone he’d attended King’s College with – not, as he claimed to Patrick Perry during their Skype call in 2015, because they were all so upset about Beatrix Steards going missing, but because Vale knew that the other people on the course would ID him the moment they saw him pretending to be Zaid. It was why Vale also withdrew almost entirely from the public eye, why he hated having his photograph taken or posted anywhere, and it was also likely to be why he’d taken up a role at the Foreign Office. It was a move I hadn’t been able to figure out: Zaid had so much money – why would he work for the FCO?

The answer was simple.

It wasn’t Zaid.

Vale’s time in government, especially at the start, had given him all the breathing room he’d needed. He’d deliberately got himself posted abroad for the first decade after Zaid’s murder, working in countries where no one knew him or had met him before. By the time he came back to the UK, the lie was so embedded and he’d so successfully severed any connections to Zaid’s former life back home that he settled into his existence in Britain totally unhindered, and with no one suspecting a thing.