“Zoe? My Lord, yes. She’s one of the best listeners. Always in the audience. Also, she’s got a gun I wouldn’t mind owning. Oh, don’t look like that. Zoe hasn’t got it in her sock drawer. Her aunt keeps it locked up. It’s an old SIG Sauer P226. Wouldn’t shoot outside of the box, anyway. Doubt it’s been cleaned in years.” Jack pushed a white plastic tube into the barrel of his rifle. “So what do you want to know, Superintendent?”

“Are you familiar with the Summerstons, who sometimes visited Bryher, specifically Gerald Summerston? Matthew Bewley said he thought you knew him.”

Jack looked up, drawing the long rod out of the bore guide. “Not very well, but we did talk some, yeah. Korean War. He got a Queen’s award for bravery, he told me.”

“Conspicuous Gallantry award. Korea. You’re interested in the Korean War?”

“Interested in all of them. But especially that one.”

“You’re familiar with the Battle of the Imjin River?”

“Who isn’t?” Jack Couch laughed. “It was huge. I wasn’t in it, I mean, I wasn’t in Korea. I was in the Falklands. Had a lot of friends in the service. My dad was at Imjin. I more or less grew up in the service. My dad—now there was a hero! Dad got the Military Cross. A real bona fide hero.” He looked away from the rifle, out through the window. “He told me not to brag about it. Poor form.” Jack smiled.

“As opposed, perhaps, to Gerald Summerston?”

Jack turned back to the gun barrel. He drew the cleaning rod back and forth. “You could say that. Thing is, my dad never talked about the medal. Never. Neither did the men who’d been with him. But Summerston brought up that battle a lot in conversation. Pretended sometimes to play it down.”

“Did you have any thoughts about his part in it? The award?”

Jack shrugged. “I questioned what the man said, that’s all. Probably because of my own father being the sort of man he was.”

Jury got up. “Well, I won’t bother you further, Mr. Couch.”

“Jack, please. And it’s no bother. You haven’t said if police have solved this one, though.”

Jury shook his head. “Not yet.”

Leaving Hell Bay to its frenzied waters, Jury sat in the bar of the Old Success talking on his mobile to Brian Macalvie.

“Did you work Daisy Cooke’s death?” asked Jury.

“Me? No. Brownell did most of the work.”

“But he was the Met. And she was his daughter. He wouldn’t have been the principal here.”

“No. The case actually belonged to a Superintendent—Smithson, as I recall.”

“Everyone saw it as a suicide?”

“Everybody except Brownell himself, even though the medical examiner found enough prescription drugs in her system to kill her.”

“What about you? You agreed with that verdict?”