Back at the dining table, he unrolled it and admired the fine draughtsmanship. It was an architect’s plan: Maison Romano. The small farmhouse they’d bought in France had needed some minor structural adjustments. Jackie handled the building work, armed with a Collins French-English dictionary and only minimal French. The end result had been perfect. The conversion had even been featured in ARA-GB!, a magazine for British ex-pats in the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region.

Now all that Joe was left with was half the cash value of the cottage, which wouldn’t buy much in the UK, and a very large piece of paper.

‘Right.’

He turned the metre-square plan over and flattened it down on its blank side. He got a pencil from a collection of about a dozen in an earthenware mug that sat on some bookshelves against the wall. Apart from a bottle of Courvoisier, a stack of CDs, and the pencils, the shelves were empty.

He wrote CRAIG SHAW in the centre-left of the enormous empty white space. To emphasize the point, he etched a box around the name in thick, uneven lines, snapping off the point of the pencil in the process.

Tossing it to the floor, he got another one from the mug and set to work. On the right-hand side of the paper he wrote JASON BEVERAGE. Then he stood up, took off his jacket and emptied the contents of its various pockets onto the table: his notebook, the print-outs that Leo Turner had given him, the folded Lobster Pot poster, a beermat from the Brown Cow, plus a few other bits and pieces that he’d accumulated over the last few days: a beermat from the Greyhound, a sachet of sugar from McDonald’s, a greasy serviette from goodness-knew-when, all the detritus of an incurable pocket-filler.

Rolling up his shirt sleeves, he made a start. At the bottom of the paper, in tiny handwriting, he drew up a list of everywhere he’d been since Thursday and every person he’d spoken to, plus every other name that had emerged during the inquiry. Then, using his notebook for reference, he wrote up his notes about every item on the list, ticking each one off as information was entered somewhere or other onto the massive sheet of paper.

An hour later and still he wasn’t done. More and more ideas were emerging, little boxes with new suggestions and ideas, most of them linked with lines and looping arrows to other names and locations… The mosaic of information around the English Patriot League became denser by the minute. Then he’d jump to somewhere else on the enormous sheet, adding a reference here, a question mark there. He made scrupulously detailed progress through his notebook, folding down the top corner of each page as its information was transferred to the plan, then doing the same with the bottom corner of each reverse page.