Gillard stroked his chin. ‘Do you ever get dead bodies flushed out of the system?’

He laughed. ‘Of rats, certainly. In London they probably get all sorts, but out here I’ve never heard of human bodies in the system.’

‘Where the body was found, had that area flooded often?’

‘Ah, you need to speak to the Environment Agency about that. That’s outside my remit.’

Gillard suppressed an inward laugh at the bureaucratic reflex. ‘One final thing – I noticed you and your colleague having a bit of an argument about something. May I ask what?’

Collier took his hat off and scratched his head. ‘There appears to have been a bit of a screw-up. Between you and me, it’s only become clear while working on phase two that what was done in the first phase didn’t match what was on the spec.’

‘In what way?’

‘I’m surprised the police are interested in this,’ Collier said.

‘Indulge me.’

‘Look, I’m not supposed to admit anything, or even discuss it, because we could get fined by the water regulator. But what was done in phase one was botched. Those higher up than me will have to decide what to do about it. And I was getting bollocked as if it was my fault. I didn’t have anything to do with phase one.’

‘But Ozzy Blanchard did?’

‘Yeah. He was the main on-site engineer.’

Chapter Six

Gillard let Collier go and retreated to his car, still feeling slightly bilious after the meal. It certainly wasn’t helped by the nature of the conversation he’d just had. He took out his iPad and looked up the news stories about the accident in January. It told him little he hadn’t already heard, except for the alarming fact that Blanchard’s vehicle had been driven against traffic on the dual carriageway for more than quarter of a mile before leaving the road. He then looked up Blanchard’s employer. Aqua Western Ltd was part of a group of four UK-based water suppliers, each with a point of the compass as part of its name, and a fifth company, Aqua Clear Ltd, which seemed to concentrate on cleaning up industrial sites and former rubbish tips. They were all owned by Aqua Holdings Plc, but the ultimate owner was a New York registered private equity company called Clearwater Partners LLC. There were pages of aspirational verbiage about how clean, green and socially responsible each of the companies were, so Gillard instead switched to news stories about the parent company, and the two young billionaires who ran it.

The most prominent of them was Titan Willard III, known as Ty. A former professional football player, a handsome six foot five, Ty Willard came from a patrician New England family. His partner was Eric Lishman, supposedly the financial genius, who had met Willard at Harvard. They were both thirty-eight, firm friends, and had made their first billion before they were thirty.