He sat back in his chair with his hands behind his head. Leroy Ceejay was making a heap of money, that much was clear. To make it clean wasn’t easy, and probably a bit more complicated than actually manufacturing the required chemicals. But a business like a restaurant, with high overheads, a lot of them in cash, would do the laundry trick just fine. Gillard could imagine how it would work. Leroy has £100,000 of cash gleaned from drug sales. He uses the cash to pay some of the legitimate bills the restaurant has incurred: local food suppliers, drinks wholesalers, casual staff. Meanwhile, Anton would use his legitimate bank accounts to pay Leroy a hefty salary for recruitment, for security services and so forth, equalling the amount that Leroy had put in. Whether the restaurant made an overall profit or not was less important than the amount of dirty money it made clean.

Of course, none of that would necessarily mean that Anton St Jeanne’s late-night party on the bridge, whether two people or three, was connected with the death of a so far unidentified Asian man. Gillard decided that he would get his financial specialist colleague Detective Sergeant Shireen Corey-Williams to examine the books. He meanwhile was going to take a closer look at the restaurant itself.

Could the Special Branch interest in Leticia Mountjoy be connected to an inquiry into her boyfriend’s business partner, Leroy Ceejay? It was an intriguing idea. There was no point asking the chief constable. He would instead make some discreet enquiries with the NCA. The National Crime Agency, Alison Rigby’s old stamping ground, had first dibs on all the major criminals operating in drugs, trafficking, weapons and cybercrime and would know if some major operation was being undertaken on Leroy Ceejay. They had a tough job to do and were often reluctant to share information with what they called plods, which basically meant anyone else in the police.

In the mist of a summer’s morning Ash Island was like an imagining from Arthurian legend. The tree-clad slopes rustled faintly in the breeze, and quicksilver ripples bounced between the many houseboats and barges. A single heron flapped lazily into the air, turning west away from the sun, as Gillard and Rainy Macintosh crossed from Hurst Meadows park on the walkway that ran across the East Molesey weir. Only the faint hum of traffic on Hampton Court Road on the other side of the river intruded on the bucolic image.