‘No,’ said Nightingale. ‘She still claims to have supplied the fatal drugs. Although frankly I don’t believe a word of it and more to the point neither did Miriam. Not least because she’s remarkably vague about where she obtained the drugs in the first place.’ He nodded at Stephanopoulos’ desk. ‘Miriam said she’d be back later if you need her for anything.’

It didn’t help that there wasn’t any physical evidence, beyond her presence at the party, to corroborate her confession. That had to be nagging at Stephanopoulos, but I doubted that if Olivia had been some seventeen year old off an estate somewhere we would have been spending this much time on the case. We had a confession and I suspect we would have charged her and let the Crown Prosecution Service sort it out.

‘I did have a moment to see if the parents were on any of our lists,’ said Nightingale.

Meaning, to check if any of them been members of the Little Crocodiles dining club while at Oxford University. Unlike other similar clubs this one had eschewed smashing up restaurants in favour of learning magic, courtesy of a former colleague of Nightingale’s called Geoffrey Wheatcroft. In this he broke the law and, more importantly, the social conventions of the Folly – he was probably lucky he died in bed before Nightingale found out.

We had several lists of names to work with, one of confirmed members in the early 1980s – provided by Lady Ty who’d been getting her double first at the time. And one of suspected members from the late fifties onwards – collated from various reliable sources. Then people who might have been members and/or were close associates of people we knew were members. As you can imagine, the last list was huge and pretty much covered everyone who’d gone to Oxford since the end of the Second World War. Unsurprisingly Martin Chorley and Albert Pryce were on that list. Pryce had gone to Geoffrey Wheatcroft’s old college – Magdalene – while Chorley had been at Oriel. One critical overlap was Chorley’s time with that of Robert Weil, who even now was doing life for the murder of an unidentified woman he’d been caught dumping in the woods near Crawley. We were as sure that he had a connection to the Little Crocodiles as we were that he hadn’t killed the woman, but we couldn’t prove either.