‘You said Caldwell had information he wanted to give you about your father. Because of something that happened recently.’

‘That’s certainly what he said.’

‘Why don’t we pop up to his flat and see if there’s anything we can spot that might give us a clue?’

‘Not sure about that,’ objected Wally. ‘The police put crime scene tape across the door and told us to keep out.’

‘But you’ve got the key?’

‘Yeah. Mrs Takenaga gave it back to me. But …’

‘We won’t disturb anything. You can come with us if you like and make sure we tread carefully.’

‘Can’t see as it can do any harm,’ said Joan.

Her approval seemed to swing it for Wally. ‘All right, then. Let’s go.’

Stooping under the blue and white police tape was easier for Nick than his two companions. Holgate, who was about as nimble as an ironing board, needed a helping hand to manage it. Once inside Caldwell’s flat, they found few signs of the previous day’s events. The desk in the study had been put back the right way up, with the telephone standing on it, apparently undamaged, although close inspection of the flex wound round it revealed the broken jackplug. The lamp Mrs Takenaga had hit the intruder with and the documents that had fallen out of the plastic bag Mrs Stapleton had seen him carrying had been taken away by the police as evidence, along with the empty box.

This was a big disappointment to Holgate, who’d hoped to find the cuttings of his old newspaper articles waiting for him. But they’d gone. And the remaining boxes didn’t appear to hold anything of interest. The locked filing cabinet promised to be a different matter, but, without the key, they could make no progress there. Otherwise, the flat contained Caldwell’s furniture, books, videos, DVDs, records and CDs. There were no pictures on the walls. There were no framed photographs standing around. The bookcase was filled with crime fiction paperbacks. The record cabinet revealed his musical taste was frozen in the 1970s.

‘Seen enough?’ asked Wally when they’d run out of rooms to prowl around.

‘Guess so,’ Holgate agreed.

‘Haven’t you got a collection of your old cuttings, Barry?’ Nick asked as they left the flat.

‘Not as comprehensive a collection as it sounds like Caldwell had.’

‘Why did he keep them, do you think?’

‘Ah, but were they his? There was Japanese writing on the box, according to Mrs Takenaga. And who do we know who lived here in 1977 who understood Japanese?’

‘Peter Ellery.’

‘Exactly. Mrs Takenaga never had the chance to study the exact dates of the cuttings. And Caldwell might have added some on his own account. But my bet is most of the contents of that box – the cuttings and all the other documents, whatever they were – belonged originally to Ellery.’