‘I was wearing a hat and large coat like you said, and I had my back to the CCTV camera,’ Paul said. ‘Can you shut the fucking window?’

George gripped the steering wheel and put his foot on the accelerator. They drove on in silence, with the windows open. By the time George came to a small jetty at the end of a private road on Ullswater’s southern shore, they were both covered in snow.

‘You’re a miserable bastard, George,’ Paul said.

George smiled at him as he parked the car and got out. He walked to the jetty and indicated to Paul that they were going for a boat ride in a small aluminium dinghy with a motor attached. Paul hung back.

‘It won’t take long,’ George reassured him.

‘This isn’t the boat, I dumped it over there,’ Paul said, pointing in the vague direction of Pooley Bridge, in the pitch blackness.

‘I know. It needs towing, you idiot.’

‘I thought the police had it?’ Paul said.

‘They couldn’t move it, so we’re going to beat them to it,’ George said.

Paul shrugged and got into the flimsy vessel. He sat on one of the benches, and smelled the faint whiff of fishing paraphernalia. He looked across the lake.

‘How long will this take, George? It’s fucking freezing,’ Paul said.

‘Not long,’ George said.

As they headed out to the middle of the lake, George handled the steering and Paul sat in the tiny open cabin, huddled away from the snow, and stared dead ahead.

George took a wrench out of his pocket and left the steering control. The purr of the small engine didn’t change and the first blow to Paul’s head was almost silent, like the humming thump of the propeller hitting the water. He kept hitting, as hard as he could, and when the wrench became slippery, he stopped. Paul’s body slumped into the centre of the boat and George kicked it away as he went back to the controls and turned the boat around, to head across to a different boathouse, which he knew was unused. The lake was littered with them. Some of them were seasonal, like this one, so by the time the holiday makers came swarming back in the spring, he’d have moved the body.