Wanda said she didn’t think she’d ever met him in the three years she’d been running The Chestnut Tree – which was entirely a good thing from her point of view. ‘It’s not like area managers ever have anything useful to say about running a pub,’ she said. ‘Is it? Especially a pub like this.’

She had interviewed for the job, here in this very room, and could provide us with a name and description but she didn’t understand why. I was tempted to tell her it was just routine but literally nobody ever believes that – even when it’s true.

‘It’s part of an ongoing inquiry into property fraud,’ I said, which was true, as far as it went.

‘Are there any storage areas in here?’ asked Guleed.

Wanda said that obviously they had food storage, dry goods, bottle storage, wine racks and a separate cool room for those casks that needed it.

‘Do have any storage you’ve never been in?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know about storage as such,’ said Wanda. ‘But there’s a couple of rooms we don’t use.’

‘You couldn’t give us a look, could you?’ I asked.

There was a corridor that was 1930s brick down one wall and 1970s breezeblock on the other. There were two doorways in the newer wall with cheap red doors made of medium density fibreboard and the kind of stainless steel lever handle and lock combination that you find fitted to schools and council buildings from John O’Groats to Land’s End.

Wanda opened them both with one of the keys from the bunch she kept in her pocket on a hoop key ring. Inside the first were a ton of stackable polyurethane chairs and, in the second, modular steel frame storage shelves that, judging by the dust, hadn’t held anything for years.

‘See,’ said Wanda locking them back-up. ‘Nothing extraordinary at all.’

‘What about that one?’ I asked.

There was a third door, this one in the old side of the corridor and made of what looked like wooden planks. It looked suspiciously as if one of the artfully rustic tables from the saloon bar had been hauled upright and jammed into the doorway.

‘Ah,’ said Wanda, looking over at the door. ‘Yeah.’ She bit her lip and looked back at us.

‘Do you have a key?’ said Guleed.

‘Yeah, I’m pretty certain we do,’ said Wanda and shuffled backward a couple of steps – away from the door. ‘But I don’t think I should let you open that door.’

I exchanged looks with Guleed. We both knew that the words ‘search warrant’ were heading for Wanda’s lips and we’d both been around enough weird bollocks to be suspicious as to why.