‘But on the Marlow side of the river. Stefan’s side. I had no idea why. But I figured I’d better keep the conversation going until we reached Stefan’s house, if only to find out why we were heading that way. So I asked Andy if he always took his clients for walks along the Thames Path, and you know what he said? He said that whenever he needed to have a conversation with a client that was deniable, he’d always suggest a little walk here. Up to “that stupid man’s house” and back again. That’s how he referred to Stefan, “that stupid man”. Naturally, I pretended to be all innocent and asked who he could be talking about, and he explained how Stefan’s house blocked the Thames Path, you had to take a detour to get around it, but luckily enough he’d recently been shot dead.’

‘He called him Stefan by name?’ Judith asked.

‘He did.’

‘So he knew him!’ Suzie chipped in.

‘But it’s more than that,’ Judith said, her eyes ablaze. ‘Are you sure he said Stefan had been shot?’

‘He did. Not that he’d died, or even that he’d been murdered, but that he’d been shot.’

‘Why’s that of interest?’ Suzie asked.

‘Because,’ Judith said, ‘the police have never said for definite how Stefan was killed. Although the papers have been speculating, it’s never been confirmed.’

‘So I said to him, “How do you know he was shot dead?”’ Becks said.

The other two women were stunned.

‘You said that?’

‘I couldn’t help myself. I mean, here are we trying to discover who killed Stefan, and there I was talking to someone who knew everything about it.’

Judith and Suzie didn’t know what to say. Without having ever conferred on the subject, they’d always dismissed Becks as being cowardly. How wrong they were.

‘What did he say?’ Judith asked.

‘He laughed. Said he knew “someone on the inside”, and the word was that Stefan had been shot dead with an antique pistol. I’ll never forget the moment. It was the look in his face. He was smirking. So sure of himself.’

‘He said it was an antique?’ Judith asked.

‘He did,’ Becks said.

The three women looked at each other.

‘Well, that’s very interesting,’ Judith said. ‘Because we’re about as close to these cases as you can be, and we’ve not heard anything about an antique pistol.’