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in my office, working through what little material we’d gathered on Farrell’s bargain basement sale. I was glad to be back in my own office, glad to shake the country bumpkin dust of Hampshire off my shoes. Then Ben walked in, a sheet of paper in his hand.
    ‘What do you know about John Stonehouse?’ he said.
    ‘Labour Cabinet minister in the Sixties, fiddled a load of money he couldn’t pay back,’ I said, dredging my memory. ‘Faked a suicide by leaving his clothes on a beach in America with a suicide note. Turned up with his mistress in Australia, where the cops picked him upbecause they thought he was Lord Lucan. Got extradited, did time. What is this? You doing the Daily Mail quick quiz again?’
    ‘Ha ha,’ Ben said, dropping the paper on my desk in front of me. ‘Just in from our friends in Hampshire.’
    I read the memo and whistled. ‘And they believe this?’
    ‘His tailor says it’s his suit, his cobbler says he made the shoes for him, and Max Carter says he did indeed witness the signature, though he didn’t know what the note said.’
    ‘Do you believe it?’ I asked.
    Ben threw himself into the chair opposite mine. ‘No. You don’t raise a king’s ransom in cash then top yourself. It doesn’t make sense.’
    ‘It does if you want to provide for your widow. Martina couldn’t run Farrell’s business. Even if he was shagging the Spanish nanny, there was still something there with the wife. They still shared a bed, Ben. The only way to make sure she was all right was to make a dash for cash and then stash it somewhere we wouldn’t find it.’
    Ben looked at me, his mouth open and his eyes wide. ‘I can’t believe I’m hearing this. You thinkJack Farrell topped himself? You really think the king of smoke and mirrors did himself in?’
    I shook my head. ‘Not for a minute. But I can see how you could make an argument for it. The guy was destroyed by his kid’s death. He couldn’t go on. But he cared enough for the mother of his child to make sure she would be OK. It’s a strong case and if we’re going to knock it down, we need facts. And we haven’t got anything on our side of the argument except the fact that we don’t appear to have a body. What do we know about the tides and currents where he went in?’
    Ben rolled his eyes and got to his feet. ‘I’m on it.’
    Within the hour, we knew three things about the part of the English Channel where Jack Farrell’s clothes had been found. One was that quite a few people choose that part of the coast as their jumping-off point for suicide. Two was that bodies usually took a week to ten days to make their way to shore about fifteen miles west of where they’d gone in. And three was that the combination of marine life and shipping meant the bodies tended to be pretty well mashed up.
    While the official line might be that Jack Farrell had topped himself, in private we knew we had to wait and see.
    As it turned out, we didn’t have to wait very long. Eight days later, we got the call from Dorset police. A body had washed up on a beach near Poole and they had reason to believe (as some cops still feel the need to say) that we might be interested in taking a look at it. Why might that be, we asked. On account of the tattoos, they said, a bit stiff.
    Ben didn’t hang about. It was pedal to the metal with our blue light flashing all the way down there. I missed Stella every mile of the way. Sure, she wasn’t the only competent pathologist in the world. But we made a good team. She understood what we needed, she was fast and she was damn good in the witness box.
    Usually a body that’s been in the sea a couple of weeks is hard to identify. The face and head get bashed about against rocks. Fingerprints get nibbled by crabs. Bodies change shape in the water. They get bloated and stop looking like themselves. That’s when you need a pathologist to read the body and tell you what you’relooking at. And to take the samples so you can check