Cottesloe handed Claire a phone. ‘Mr Jakes took these photographs of the dead man.’ Claire recoiled at the graphic images. The entire face and neck was purple and swollen, the eyelids inflated and the eyeballs themselves almost popping out of his head. Clearly, he had sustained very similar injuries to those of the body on the island, though this victim was still clothed. The pictures showed a short-sleeved shirt and blue trousers.

‘May we keep this for now to help with the identification?’ she asked Jakes.

‘No need. I’ll tell you who it is, it’s Neville Rollason,’ Jakes said.

‘Did you know Mr Rollason then?’ Claire asked.

‘Not exactly know, seeing as he has been inside for decades,’ Jakes said. ‘But I know what he looks like.’ He reached for his phone, and she gave it back to him. He swiped through, and then turned the screen back to her. ‘This is him,’ he said. The picture was of a smiling white-haired pensioner with red-framed spectacles, resting his chin winsomely on one hand. The interior background was more convincing than the subject. It looked institutional, with just the kind of unbreakable plastic furniture she had seen in prisons.

Claire had only seen the same historic images of Rollason as every tabloid reader. The scowling goblin was stuck in every mother’s imagination and she was one of those, too, as well as being a cop. She’d seen nothing recent. This picture could be anybody. She doubted Jakes and had growing concerns about his mental stability. She reached for his mobile and, before bagging it for evidence, took a snap of the image of the older man with her own phone. She left Jakes with the uniforms while she made her way over to Yaz Quoroshi inside the crime tent.

Quoroshi greeted her warmly, then added. ‘Looks like he’s struck again.’ The snap judgement from the CSI chief was that the body had been at the site only a very short time, the time of death probably a few hours before.

‘So that fits with the witness who claims to have seen a car with its boot open just before?’

‘Yes,’ Quoroshi said. ‘On the face of it. But I gather our principal witness is a little on the tainted side.’

‘And not just by puke,’ she said. She was going to make sure that he was taken to Staines police station in a patrol car. She didn’t want him in hers. Especially before she had a chance to finish her breakfast. The first thing she had to do was to send off Jakes’s pictures of the older man and the body to Special Branch to see if either of them really were Neville Rollason.