She turned on the torch and the metal clasp shone up at her. Oh Jack, what were you doing? She laid the briefcase on the little table in the kitchen and scanned the room with her torch for something she could use to open it. Leather could be cut. There must be something. She got down on her knees and reached through the little curtain under the dirty old sink. There was nothing. In the kitchen drawer, old knives, but nothing sharp enough. Then she had an idea. She remembered that there’d been a cupboard with crabbing equipment, rusty traps and buckets. In one of the buckets was a small knife. It had probably been used for slitting open crabs. She ran her finger along the blade. Sharp enough. She hacked and hacked at the leather and at first it hardly made a mark. It was like slicing through tough, old skin. She tried not to think about how Jack had been sliced open. Soon, the briefcase had a deep, jagged line carved into it, below the lock. She pushed her hand down inside the slit she had made and felt shiny paper. Ripping the slashed leather further apart, she pulled out the handful of papers inside, spread them out on the table and shone the torch on them.

Photographs. A4 size, printed onto high-quality photographic paper, black and white and artistically arranged, as if they were paintings. Not Top Secret or Classified documents. All of women, lying or sitting, most of them on a bed, looking away from the camera. Half naked. Their white thighs, bare shoulders, exposed flesh shone out in the gloom of the cabin. Most of them she didn’t know. They were strangers. Prostitutes she guessed, with dark make-up around their eyes and dimpled skin, a breast lolling into an armpit. With a shock, she recognised one of the women, clothed this time, taken outside. With fumbling, urgent hands, she flicked through them and dropped them on the table. She was nauseated. He was a voyeur and a pervert. This wasn’t it. This couldn’t be it.