Bloody thing! Muttering to herself, Judith entered the passcode and then opened her web browser. Maybe there’d been some news about Stefan in the last twenty-four hours?

She typed ‘Stefan Dunwoody’ into the search bar, but all of the hits told her he owned an art gallery called Dunwoody Arts in Marlow, a fact she already knew. But she wanted to be thorough, so she clicked through the pages of results.

Although, what was this? One of the later results was a link to a webpage from a local newspaper, the Bucks Free Press. It was the headline that caught her attention: BUST-UP AT HENLEY REGATTA.

Clicking the link, she found herself reading a diary piece from a roundup of the Henley Royal Regatta, six weeks before.

Word reaches us that Stefan Dunwoody, local art gallery owner, got into a tipsy dispute in the Royal Enclosure with Elliot Howard, owner of the Marlow Auction House. According to our little birdie, when Mr Howard threatened to punch Mr Dunwoody, the stewards were called and both men were forcibly ejected.

Judith put her tablet down. So, Stefan had got into a drunken altercation at Henley with someone called Elliot Howard, and here he was, only a few short weeks later, and there’d been another set-to of some sort on his property.

A set-to where someone had fired a gun.

And then Stefan had subsequently vanished.

Sod this for a game of soldiers, Judith thought as she strode across the room, swept up her cloak from its peg and left the house.

She went down to her boathouse, approached an old punt that was half in and half out of the water and gave it a shove with her foot. She stepped up onto the back of it and grabbed the punting pole as the front of the boat bumped through the rotten boathouse doors and slipped out onto the river.

Despite her advanced years, Judith was an expert punter. With a flick of her wrists, she thrust the pole down into the riverbed, bent at the waist and pushed with all her might. As the punt shot forward, she twisted the pole up and out of the soft mud, and the boat had the momentum to cross the river.

Once she reached the further bank and the river was shallow again, it was no effort to punt upstream the fifty or so yards to Stefan’s house, use the prow of the punt to penetrate the wall of reeds that protected his riverbank, and step up onto his land. She didn’t need to secure the boat. Entirely surrounded by bulrushes, it wasn’t going anywhere.

Checking her watch, Judith could see that just over eight minutes ago, she’d been sitting in her house, and now here she was, at the sharp end of her neighbour’s mysterious disappearance.