Perhaps Barnes had found out, George thought. Perhaps one of the Jessie Ellen’s passengers had been paid by him to murder Greg. Then he thought he was being silly. Barnes was a businessman, not a gangster, and the idea that one of the people staying at Myrtle Cottage was a professional killer was laughable.

Vicky was lost in thought, and he decided it was time to go.

“Look,” he said, “can I get in touch with anyone to stay the night with you? A friend or a relative?”

But he knew the answer before she replied. “No,” she said. “There’s no one.”

He was in the gloomy hall when she called him back.

“People didn’t realise,” she said. “ With Greg it was a game, a bluff. He didn’t do it for the money. Not really. It was the excitement, the sense of power. If the people hadn’t paid him, he would never have used the information he had against them. That’s not blackmail. Is it?”

But she didn’t wait for an answer, and with her image of Greg reconstructed, she returned to her flat.

George stood for a moment, collecting his thoughts under a streetlight. The street was quiet. He realised later that the car must have been parked with others outside the flats. He did not hear the noise of the engine until he had turned up the alley, and then it was so close behind him and the headlamps were so bright that there was little he could do to escape. He squeezed against the high brick wall just in time, and he thought it was a drunken driver, that he had had a close shave. It was only when the car braked sharply and backed with a sudden screech of tyres, then came at him again, that he realised he was the target of a deliberate attack. There was nothing then that he could do. The bonnet of the car caught him and threw him towards a row of dustbins stacked neatly against a wall. Just before he lost consciousness, he heard the clatter of a lid as it fell onto the alley and saw the trail light of the car as it disappeared into the main street.

Chapter Ten

When Claire Bingham had finished the interviews with the guests at Myrtle Cottage, Wargan called her back to Heanor and told her the investigation lacked direction. He had been speaking to an officer from the serious crime squad in Bristol about Rosco’s previous conviction for arson. It was, it seemed, a simple act of revenge. He had been sacked from Sinclair’s boat yard and had set fire to the place on the same night. The files said that Rosco was a strange, moody sort of man. You could imagine him reacting to a difficult situation with a burst of violent temper. The court had accepted that Rosco had not known about the security officer’s visiting the place.