Staunce was actually quicker to find, now Quill had got into the ways of this place. He was a retired grandee, working on endless charitable schemes that always came to nothing, all the Hell money spent on them frittered away in graft, as he always complained at many luxurious dinners. After those dinners he would suffer days of indigestion and acid reflux that would leave him gasping on the floor of his study, unable to reach for water. He could have paid for water, but it seemed he was unwilling to do so. Quill found him in that condition, but, even curled up around himself like a wounded animal, he wanted to be interviewed. He wanted to talk to anyone. ‘He paid me to tell him things which only the police knew,’ he said, ‘back in the day. Particularly gossip about celebrities. They deserved what they got. And it was harmless. Argggghh!’ He gasped and curled up around himself again. ‘But I stopped! I stopped because I knew it was wrong! Is no one listening?’

‘Who paid you?’ asked Quill.

He was told the name, and about how Staunce had taken another payment, and what it was for. ‘You sold us out,’ Quill said, ‘to Russell Vincent.’ He looked up to see an enormous roast being brought in by Staunce’s servants.

‘But … but I thought about turning the tables. I thought about turning him in, taking the evidence to the cabinet office…’

Quill straightened up and nodded to him. ‘Thanks for that. I’ll leave you to it; I don’t want to get in the way of your dinner.’

*   *   *

Tunstall was in a workhouse, walking on an enormous wheel that was slowly grinding a millstone. He wore a long coat made of weights. Quill wondered aloud if this was something he was doing to himself.

‘No,’ the man sighed, ‘this is very much something being done to me by others.’

‘What got you killed?’

So Quill was told about a working life spent making some extra cash on the side, necessary to keep a home for his wife and child. The man had, as Quill suspected, been the one who searched Spatley’s office. ‘Not very professionally, I should think, but pretty thoroughly.’ Quill was amazed, distantly, by the idea that Tunstall might still take pride in the quality of such a job. Tunstall had been told to stop the car, when he’d been driving Spatley, in a specific place at a specific time. ‘We’d already worked out where security might send us if a particular road got blocked up. I didn’t know what was going to happen. I was so shocked after … well, I didn’t even know if that had been what the bloke I was working for had planned…’

Quill asked for a description, and recognized the man who’d met Mary Arthur at the Soviet bar.