But Judith knew, in the same way you couldn’t give up on a crossword clue until you’d gone through all of the permutations – tried every single letter of the alphabet – she should keep trying to see what links she could find to rowing among the witnesses and victims. So she typed ‘Iqbal Kassam’ and ‘rowing’ into the search bar.

There were no hits.

Next she typed both ‘Liz Curtis’ and ‘Danny Curtis’ plus the word ‘rowing’ into the search bar, but she got hundreds of hits, mostly from travel and tourism websites and blogs.

Judith frowned to herself. How was it going to be possible to find out about Liz’s rowing career rather than her rowing centre? She tried clicking through on the links, and running the search again using different words, but she kept getting nowhere. There were any number of online articles praising the rowing centre as a great day out for the kids, or lamenting its closure during the most recent floods, but nothing that specifically tied Liz or her husband Danny to competitive rowing.

By midnight, Judith’s mind was scrambled. The ‘thinking Scotch’ she’d been drinking had very much turned into ‘unthinking Scotch’ sometime around ten-ish, and she wasn’t sure what she’d achieved since then. She’d tried searching every local newspaper’s website, and every nearby rowing club’s website as well, from William Borlase’s and Great Marlow schools to the Marlow town rowing club, and the Leander club in Henley. But no matter how hard she hunted, she couldn’t find the link.

Her whole evening had been a busted flush.

And yet Judith still had a feeling in her soul that she was on the right track. And even deeper within her was the knowledge that the local newspaper and rowing websites only went back so far. Everything was digitally up-to-date for the last ten years or so, but in the ten years before then, the various websites had a spotty record of scanned information or incomplete copy-typed archives. As for the preceding decades, the 1990s and 1980s, none of the newspapers had a searchable database, and it was the same for the rowing clubs as well. Both Elliot’s career as a schoolboy rower and Liz’s for Team GB pre-dated the internet by some distance.

Judith hauled herself to her feet. It was time for bed. But before she oriented herself so she could aim for the foot of the staircase, she found her hand going to the key around her neck and her eyes blurrily focusing on the oak door to the side of the drinks table. She was dimly aware that while this was very definitely not the time, it was possible she wouldn’t be able to put it off any longer.

On the way to bed, Judith told herself that a good night’s sleep would hopefully provide a solution.

The extraordinary thing was, she was right.

Chapter 34