‘I think Dominique was trying to tell me something before he was shot. He kept talking about a place where the sun sets behind the water.’

‘But Norfolk is the east coast.’

‘Yes, but Devil’s Point faces west, across the Wash. It’s one of the few places you can see the sun set behind the water on the east coast.’

*

The closest they could get to Devil’s Point was a small gravelled car park a quarter of a mile below the cliff face. There was a viewpoint looking out over the sea and a couple of picnic tables next to the car park – the stop was probably popular in the summer for coastal drives. The road ended at the car park but there was a track beaten into the heath by ramblers that wound its way up to the top of the cliff. There was also evidence of a possible track up to the top which might be passable in a vehicle but it wasn’t clear. Priest wanted to approach the Point discreetly, which would have been difficult to achieve in a four- hundred-horsepower car.

They got out and Priest looked around. No one in sight, just the gulls circling overhead and squawking angrily. He felt light-headed, it had taken them just over an hour and a half with the BMW’s twin turbo engine screaming to get them here and all the way one thought had harassed Priest: what if he was wrong? What if Karl was elsewhere and Julian was already dead?

‘We did some checks on Dominque Elias,’ Rowlinson said, as they made their way towards the pathway.

‘Does he have previous?’

‘No. He lived a fairly uneventful life, by the sounds of things. He did twenty years in banking but for most of his life he’s just been Alexia Elias’s husband – I guess he made enough to enable him to do whatever he wanted.’

‘I’ll bet.’

‘What’s the truth of it, Priest?’

‘She was taking charity money all the time, leaking it through various offshore companies, but Jack Oldham, the charity board’s chairman, could never prove it and there was a network of well-paid partisans to create enough of a distraction to keep us off the scent.’

‘You should have handed it over to us.’

‘We did. You weren’t interested. Something about budget cuts and not enough evidence.’ Rowlinson at least had the decency to look ashamed, although it obviously wasn’t him who had made that call. ‘You were saying about Dominique?’

‘Yeah. One interesting thing.’

‘Let me guess. An allegation.’

‘Two. One in 1998 and one in 2001. Never went anywhere but he was interviewed, voluntarily.’

‘Where?’ Priest felt his throat constrict, his fists ball. Shooting Dominique had been too good for him.

‘An Elias Foundation-sponsored children’s home in Sussex.’

‘Jesus fuck. How old?’

‘Nine and ten.’

Priest looked away, sickened.