He began with the living room. There was a laptop on a small escritoire by the window. He switched it on and left it to boot up while he looked around. A handful of paperbacks sat on a shelf beside a blue rubber radio. He flicked through the books. Nothing. A stack of English newspapers on the coffee table revealed nothing more than that Jackson liked to do the crosswords and was good at them. The notepad by the phone contained nothing except a note of her arrangement to meet Tadzio at the boat. A briefcase held surprisingly little; estate agent’s details of a couple of properties in Ipswich with some scribbled notes in the margins relating to their suitability; a printer’s proof copy of a catalogue of hand-made wooden toys with a post office box in Norwich as the ordering address; a sheet of paper with what looked like a series of financial calculations; and a statement for a current account at a bank in Bury St Edmunds. Krasic copied down the details of the account then replaced everything as he had found it.

He turned his attention to the laptop. She didn’t even have it password protected, he noted contemptuously. He opened up her comms program, his heart sinking as he saw a couple of hundred e-mails in the in-box. He opened a few at random and found nothing of any significance. They seemed mostly to be from friends or business contacts, generally concerning arrangements for meetings or the exchange of gossip. Ideally, he could use a few hours alone with it to go through everything in more detail, but that wasn’t going to happen.

Next, Krasic opened her word processing software. There was a folder of letters, many of which seemed to be concerned with the lease of a former US airbase in East Anglia and applications for its change of use to light industrial units and residential accommodation for the workforce. Other letters dealt with property sales and purchases, none of which meant anything to him. He opened another folder called ‘project EA’. His heart leapt when he saw among the file list one labelled ‘Radecki’. Eagerly, he opened it.