‘Don’t worry, it’s not as bad as it sounds. Elliot is fifty-eight years old, which means he would have joined Sir William Borlase’s Grammar School in 1973, and would have left, aged eighteen, in 1980. And Borlase always row at the Marlow Town Regatta, and at Henley as well. They happen in June and July. So we’re only interested in checking the local papers for the months of June and July in the seven years between 1973 and 1980. It shouldn’t take too long.’

‘Are you saying that Stefan’s murder didn’t have anything to do with the Rothko on his wall?’ Becks asked. ‘He was killed because of something to do with rowing?’

‘Actually, I think I’ve worked out how the Rothko fits into all of this, seeing as the painting currently on Stefan’s wall is the real deal.’

‘You’ve worked out why Elliot stole the frame from the real painting?’

‘I think I have. But that’s just a sideshow for the moment. I’m convinced that if we can find who Elliot rowed with, we’ll finally work out why Stefan, Iqbal and Liz had to die.’

Judith had said their task wouldn’t take long, but she was wrong. It turned out she couldn’t remember what system she’d used for storing local newspapers in the 1970s, although she was at pains to point out that there had been a system of some sort in the early days, unlike in the more recent decades. It seemed that each publication had its own stack, with the oldest papers on the very bottom, but the system was by no means thorough. It was only possible to say that there’d be a run of one local paper for a number of months, or even as long as a year if they were lucky, and then the stack would change, for some unknown reason, to a different local newspaper, or suddenly jump to a different year. All that seemed to be broadly true was that the newspapers on the bottom of piles tended to be older than the newspapers at the top of each pile. But there were hundreds of separate stacks of newspaper all squashed tight in the bookcases.

Becks, for her part, struggled to batten down her panic as the dust swirled and settled in her hair, and on her clothes and her skin. But she made herself go through with it, and it was Becks who came up with the best system for working through the newspapers. She’d riffle the dry edges of a stack, trying to find the dates on the corners of each page. If they were from before June, she’d work upwards from that point and head downwards if the date was from after July. And once she found any newspapers that covered June or July, she’d oh-so-carefully prise them out from within the stack so they could then be searched more thoroughly.