Detective Chief Inspector Craig Gillard had been stuck at the computer all morning. He had been puzzling over the discrepancy between the number of people who had been seen in chef Anton St Jeanne’s white BMW by witnesses – three – and the claim by the man himself that only he and his girlfriend Leticia had been there. Did Mr St Jeanne have something to hide? The search of his car had turned up nothing of obvious interest. The boot had contained some decorating materials, and an unopened wine box. There was no trace of human hair, blood or anything else that would get a crime scene investigator excited. Samples from the seats were currently being tested to see if there was any match to the DNA of the dead man. That would take another day to come through.

The detective often took an elliptical approach to a difficult problem, so he had spent quite a while on Companies House, looking up the details of ASJ (Kingston) Ltd, the company that owned the restaurant J’adore Ça.

The listing details showed it had been incorporated four years previously, with Mr St Jeanne as sole proprietor. It had made a loss of increasing size every year, starting at £25,000 and finally exceeding £75,000. Gillard was no expert on corporate finance, but it seemed to him that unless something improved, J’adore Ça was heading for bankruptcy. There was something else significant too, perhaps the most interesting information he had gleaned so far. Just over eighteen months ago, an additional director had been appointed, with a forty-nine per cent share in the business. His name was Mr L. Churchill Jenkins. That name didn’t flag up anything significant in Gillard’s mind, but the address of the director certainly did. It was Effingham House, a notorious tower block in south London, rife with drug dealing. When Gillard checked across on the Police National Computer, he found that the flat number mentioned corresponded to a known gangster by the name of Leroy Churchill Jenkins, better known as Leroy Ceejay, a man with ambitions in the world of rap, but more significant achievements in the arena of drugs. Cross-referencing to the man’s criminal record, he saw that Jenkins was thought to be head of the Mambas, an organised crime group with its own amphetamine-manufacturing operation.