DS Tanika Malik was reading the ballistics report on Stefan Dunwoody’s death when an officer rang through to tell her that a woman called Mrs Judith Potts was waiting in the reception area for her. DS Malik was briefly puzzled, but told the officer to take Mrs Potts to a meeting room and tell her she’d join her in a few minutes. There was a very pressing matter she needed to deal with first.

She picked up her phone and dialled the number at the top of the report.

‘Are you saying the bullet that killed Mr Dunwoody was an antique?’ she asked the forensic officer as soon as she was put through.

‘That’s right,’ the woman on the other end of the line said.

‘Are you sure?’

‘The bullet we retrieved from Mr Dunwoody’s skull was a 7.65 millimetres by 21 millimetre parabellum, and that’s a very specific size that was only used up until the Second World War by the German armed forces.’

‘Are you serious?’

‘I’m afraid so. It was fired from a Second World War German Luger pistol.’

‘And that would work, would it? A seventy-year-old bullet?’

‘The Germans knew how to make pistols. Still do. Sure it would work.’

DS Malik thanked the officer for her help and hung up the call. One of the truisms of policing in the UK was how hard it was to lay your hands on a working handgun. It was just as hard to get hold of an antique gun that hadn’t been decommissioned.

Unless you were an antique dealer, perhaps?

After her second conversation with Judith, DS Malik had rung Elliot Howard to follow up on her tip-off. Elliot had happily admitted that he had indeed had an argument with Stefan at the Henley Royal Regatta, but it had only been because Stefan was blocking his view. And although it had got rather heated, it had been six weeks ago, so it was all water under the bridge.

As for his movements on the night Stefan died, DS Malik knew that the pathologist’s report had concluded that Stefan had been shot sometime between 7 p.m. and 10 p.m., so she’d asked Elliot where he’d been between those hours. He’d explained that he’d been at choir practice at All Saints’ Church, then gone to the pub for a pint afterwards, and he hadn’t left the pub until around 10 p.m.