The same address. Tickett had been thirty-one when he had been sentenced to seventeen years for killing a neighbour, Henry Willow, in 1982. Tickett would now be sixty-nine. That could well have been him in the car.

Interesting that a dead body should be found so close by.

Gillard closed up the device, and drove off to Haslemere. He had some research to do.

Haslemere was a well-to-do Surrey town, and Gillard knew there would be no difficulty finding what he was looking for. He parked the Vauxhall by a parade of shops outside a row of three estate agents. He asked the same questions in each, but it was only on the third that he got the comprehensive answer he was looking for.

‘Rissington Common?’ answered the middle-aged suit, barely able to restrain his surprise. ‘And are you looking to buy or rent?’

‘Buy,’ Gillard said. He passed on some bogus details about his budget, before asking what there was in the area. ‘We got some very nice places in Upper Rissington, still within your price bracket. That’s a very up-and-coming area.’ He tapped a ballpoint pen at his screen.

‘But Rissington Common?’

‘Do you have connections there, is that why you’re interested?’ The man asked Gillard to take a seat, and he did.

‘No. It just looks nicely out of the way.’

The estate agent’s woolly eyebrows shot almost to the top of his head ‘It is certainly that, sir. And I have to admit you do get a lot for your money.’ He stood and turned to a filing cabinet, reached right to the back, and brought out a handful of dog-eared property listings. ‘We’ve got three or four cottages, with plenty of scope for modernisation, the sort of character projects you could really put your thumbprint on. How many bedrooms are you looking for?’

‘At least a couple. But I have heard stories about bad sewers and so forth.’

The estate agent sat down and appraised Gillard. ‘Indeed, and you will appreciate that’s why you get so much for your money.’

‘So what exactly is the story?’

‘Well, all the land around there is on the floodplain, which used not to be a problem until the 2009 floods. Unfortunately there was also a sewer bottleneck there, supposedly fixed a year ago. There had been quite a few instances of discharges into the river during heavy rainfall. I’m not aware that many of the houses themselves have been flooded with it, but getting buildings insurance for many of those properties is difficult. Planning permission isn’t straightforward either because the land is designated as contaminated.’

‘That’s difficult for the inhabitants.’

The estate agent steepled his fingers. ‘Absolutely. And that’s why I would thoroughly recommend Upper Rissington. Got a lovely Victorian semi just come on the market, no chain, beautiful aspect, absolute bargain in my view.’