‘No. That’s all I remember. I wasn’t suspicious when I first passed him. It was dark.’

‘I still don’t get why you had this brainwave. I mean, it’s enough that you assume a vehicle with a defective indicator light is the same one you saw before, but an even bigger leap to assume that every time you see this car and this man he’s got a body to dump. Wouldn’t you say?’

Jakes just wrung his hands, only stopping to pick at tiny lumps of plaster on his knuckles.

‘Did you get the number plate of the parked vehicle?’

‘No, I didn’t.’

‘What make of car?’

‘I don’t know. I can’t drive, because of my nystagmus. I’ve never really taken an interest in mechanical things.’

‘Come on, you must have noticed something. Was it an estate car or a saloon? A big four-wheel drive? Was there a trailer?’

Jakes’s eye set off on one of its heavenward journeys. ‘There was no trailer, that’s for sure. And the man was at the boot. He was taking off gloves.’

‘Gloves, you didn’t mention that. It may be significant.’

‘It didn’t seem to me a big car and I thought it was old from the sound of the engine as it overtook me.’

She turned back to her notes. ‘But the thing you most clearly noticed was the faulty indicator?’

‘That’s right. Because it was just like the other vehicle I’d seen in the distance at Tagg’s Island.’

Claire put her pen down again. ‘Can I ask why you were cycling around at four in the morning?’

‘It’s a habit of mine. I can’t sleep sometimes. I have a circuit that goes through Hurst Meadows park, along the edge of the Thames and back to Walton on the A3050 or back the other way along Hampton Court Road. During the summer I do it four or five times a week. It would be far too busy during the day. But ever since the splash I’m always keeping an eye out for the car I saw at Tagg’s.’

‘Can I ask again, what made you start looking around in the bushes?’

Jakes didn’t answer.

‘What about this photograph that you say is Rollason? Where did you get that from?’

He stared down at the floor, wringing his hands again. Getting no reply, Claire left him in the suite and went into the corridor to make a phone call. She got through to Gillard, who was still at the site of the Farnborough raid.

‘Just following up from the email earlier, Craig,’ she said.

‘Is it Rollason?’

‘Could well be. Quoroshi thinks so. Same MO as the previous body, worse if anything.’

‘The witness said it was Rollason, that was the message I got,’ Gillard said.

‘Yes, Michael Jakes. The splash witness at Tagg’s Island.’