‘Same here,’ said Priest. This time Elinor was in a crowd, pointing a Dictaphone at an unseen panel of people. And again, walking down Oxford Street carrying a shopping bag, going into her Blackheath home, coming out again, shopping at a supermarket, cleaning her car, meeting a man at a bar. Some of them showed a much younger Elinor, with shorter hair and skinnier arms, at university maybe. With friends on a grassy hillside. All the time never realising she was being photographed.

‘Oh, shit,’ muttered Priest. ‘A little obsessive, don’t you think?’

‘Look at this one,’ said Rowlinson, handing Priest a photograph with torn edges apparently taken with a Polaroid. The quality was poor, wrong exposure and, with the sun hovering in the background, the people weren’t easy to make out at first but, after some scrutiny, it was clearly a young Elinor Fox at a ball, this time wearing a short black dress, smiling with braces around her teeth. Is that? Priest looked closer at the tall, thin, bespectacled man next to her. He had a beard and long hair, and an arm awkwardly hooked around her waist. She didn’t seem impressed.

‘I think that’s a younger Karl Jones,’ Priest concluded. It was difficult to tell – the Karl Jones that Priest knew looked so different but there was something familiar about the way he stood, his pose.

‘I’m not so sure. I only met the guy once but this doesn’t look like him.’

‘Something’s amiss, but it’s him with Elinor. I’m sure.’

Rowlinson looked closer. ‘Really? You think they were an item?’

‘She’s doesn’t look very comfortable with him and it’s the only one I can see where they’re together. Except here—’ Priest took down another photograph, apparently taken on the same night, at least Elinor was wearing the same dress but this time she was in a group, squeezed between two other men. Karl was at the back, posing like the rest of them, but his eyes were clearly lingering over the girl in the black dress at the front.

‘I don’t like the way he’s looking in this one.’

‘Elinor told me she had a stalker at university,’ groaned Priest. ‘It just didn’t seem significant at the time.’

‘Ah, double shit, Priest, look at this.’ Rowlinson handed across the photograph he had been studying and directing him to the back of it.

Priest read aloud the pencil scrawl on the reverse of the photograph – ‘The Three Monkeys’ Ball. Fifteenth of May, 2001’.

‘The three monkeys. See no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil.’