Sam took another sip. ‘He was obsessed with getting back at you, Craig. He asked me a lot of questions when I was captive in that awful garage, about you and about the state of the investigation. I don’t think he ever wanted me for who I am, but just couldn’t bear the idea that I’d chosen you over him.’

Gillard gave a wan smile. ‘It just showed he’d never grown up. He had such a big inferiority complex that he could only feed it by trying to sleep with as many women as possible.’

‘I do remember,’ Sam said, ‘that he hated his family and never wanted anything to do with them because they were brutal to him as a child. Only in the army did he ever feel that he belonged. I’m surprised he ever left.’

‘He got a dishonourable discharge after only a few months, that’s why,’ he said. ‘A sexual offence of some kind, unsurprisingly.’

‘There was something else I heard when I was held captive. It was about Beatrice Ulbricht. He’d had some kind of row with Angie on the Sunday evening, and had gone out to meet an escort at a hotel, but she didn’t show. On his way home he saw Beatrice at a bus stop where he gave her a lift. Of course being Gary he thinks women will just melt at the first thing he says. But when she refused his advances she fought back like crazy apparently, kicking and punching and using pepper spray. He complained that it got sprayed all over the car, and wouldn’t come off. I think that’s why he dreamt up this elaborate plot to have the vehicle stolen from him.’

‘And of course helped by Vanessa, who worshipped the ground on which he walked,’ Gillard said. ‘When we talked to her, she said that they practised the theft manoeuvre for half an hour on an old airfield until she got the feeling of the vehicle.’

After lunch, they finished their drinks and drove off for an afternoon together in the warm sunshine. They found themselves at the pleasant riverside village of Lacey Dutton. They walked over the Loxcombe Bridge, now fully repaired, and strolled along the embankment where inquisitive ducks gathered at the water’s edge hoping to be fed.

At that same exact moment, in Croydon crematorium, a private funeral service was taking place. The celebrant, an experienced sixty-seven-year-old called Michael Noonan, looked out at the almost empty benches of those who had gathered to witness the life of a man christened Graeme Garrison. Noonan always tried to speak to the friends and relatives before a funeral service. Often it was impossible because of the numbers. But in this case the task had been simple, because they were so few. In the front row, the redoubtable grandmother, Betty, was there with a couple of elderly neighbours from her care home. And there were also two elegant and well turned out women, Angie and Sophie, who were sitting at the opposite ends of the rear bench. Each had described themselves as Graeme’s partner.