Blythe had got through his second beer by the time Mohktar had finished Nikki’s story. Mohktar waited. Blythe was thinking, rubbing his fingers up and down his glass, making patterns in the condensation.

‘I must check the files, but do you think there is any chance that both twins went out together that afternoon. That Nikki ran back because she was afraid and blocked it out?’

‘I am unsure. Mrs Campbell also is wondering how long Nikki was out on the beach that afternoon. Undoubtedly she was frightened, but I do not think she understood why she felt afraid. Now we know why she was confused. But you are not thinking she saw the murder, Inspector?’

‘No. I don’t think that. If Nikki Montrose had witnessed her sister being murdered she would have been far more traumatised…hysterical. But what if she had gone after her sister, followed her a little way, seen the man in question and returned to her mother’s bed?’

‘Inspector, you were one of the officers who questioned her. She was only five years old but the report at that time says she never wavered or changed what she said about that afternoon to you or anyone.’

Blythe sighed again. ‘That’s true. But I don’t know how proficient we were at questioning children in those days. She was a very distressed little girl. I don’t think we pushed it.’

‘If she had recognised the man on the beach with her sister, she would have picked him out at the time. Children are honest, Inspector. I think she has lived with the guilt of knowing that if they had gone out together her twin would not have been killed.’

‘Possibly, but not necessarily. I certainly think the murder was opportunist, not planned. But Mohktar, I find it difficult to believe a man would kill a child because of what she might have seen. How could he possibly be convinced it was the right twin?’

‘Because, apparently, it was of common knowledge that one twin always wore a dress with blue roses and one with pink, it was how their parents told them apart. Nikki says she was carrying her dress with the pink roses the afternoon she saw the man with her father.’

‘So he knew the family, but not well it seems. If he had mixed with them socially both twins would have remembered him.’

‘I suppose the husband must have made a point of not inviting him to the house.’

‘What a damn nuisance you didn’t have the photographs of the officers staying at the rest houses at the time with you this morning.’

‘Nikki Montrose is not going to forget, Sir, by the morning.’

‘Mohktar! We’ll go round tonight, get this cleared up…’

‘Sir. I believe it important for them and for us too that mother and daughter talk tonight. They have much to say to one another. When secrets come out, it is very hard…’

‘Well, perhaps. Maybe something else will come out of it too. You do understand that all this doesn’t prove anything. Nikki Montrose saw the officer in her father’s bed but she did not see the face of her sister’s killer. It doesn’t make him the same person.’