‘Detective Inspector?’ Apte prompted, and Fleet realised the PCC’s question hadn’t been purely rhetorical. He genuinely seemed to think that, barely an hour after being presented with Lance Wheeler’s body, and having come straight from the scene to this meeting, Fleet might have some definitive answers. Fleet didn’t know a lot about Apte, and this was the first time they’d met, but he was aware the man had never been a copper himself. As the police and crime commissioner, he was the elected official to whom the chief constable was accountable, but in his former life Apte had been a banker.

‘I would agree that the most logical explanation for Wheeler’s suicide was that he was involved somehow in Ben’s death,’ Fleet said. ‘But two typed words on a screen hardly constitute a signed confession. And from the little we know about Wheeler’s personal situation, there seem to be plenty of other reasons he may have decided to take his own life.’

‘Such as?’ said Apte.

‘Well, it was pretty obvious from the state of his flat that he was broke,’ said Fleet. ‘The landlord was the one to let us in, and – according to the uniforms who were with him – almost the first words out of his mouth when he saw Wheeler’s body were about the number of weeks Wheeler was in arrears on his rent. And from what we’ve gathered so far, Wheeler was a loner. Neighbours never saw him with friends, rarely ever saw him going out. The owner of the decorating company Wheeler worked for reckoned Wheeler was suffering from depression. Said he was becoming so unreliable, he’d been considering letting him go.’

‘But the timing,’ Apte repeated. ‘First the Draper boy’s body is discovered, next Wheeler receives a phone call from your detective sergeant, and then the man commits suicide. Surely you have to concede that the course of events is categorical.’

Fleet tried to ignore the way Apte had described Ben. For some reason, every time anyone referred to him as the Draper boy, Fleet felt a flash of irritation. He’d experienced something similar when Adrian Harris, Beaconsfield’s headmaster, had insisted on calling him Benjamin, in spite of the fact that, from what Fleet had learned, no one else ever had. In both cases, it seemed an attempt to strip Ben of his identity, to render his death somehow less meaningful.

‘As I say,’ Fleet responded, ‘the timing would suggest a link of some kind. But if Wheeler was struggling already, maybe it was just the memory of his friend going missing – the realisation that Ben was really dead – that finally tipped him over the edge. Maybe that’s what Wheeler was sorry about. The way things turned out.’