‘Geoffrey,’ she said laying a hand on my arm. ‘It’s nothing like that.’ She laughed, throwing her head back.

‘Well what is it, then?’ I asked determinedly.

She leaned forward close to me. ‘Wrong time of the month,’ she said. ‘I was so afraid you would ask me to sleep with you, and I don’t want to, not like this.’

‘Oh,’ I said, embarrassed. ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘It’s not a disease you know,’ she said with a laugh, the sparkle back in her eyes. ‘It’ll be gone by Monday, or Tuesday.’

‘Oh,’ I said again. ‘Monday or Tuesday,’ I repeated rather vaguely.

‘And I’m not on call on either night,’ she giggled.

I didn’t know whether to feel embarrassed, excited or just plain foolish.

The publican came over to our table to save me from further blushes. There was another man behind him. ‘There’s a chap here who used to play cricket with Jack,’ he said. ‘He may be able to help you.’

‘Thank you very much,’ I said.

The man pulled up a chair and sat down at the table.

‘Pete Ritch,’ the man said by way of introduction. ‘Hear you’re looking for Jack Rensburg.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’m Geoffrey Mason and this is Eleanor.’ He nodded at her.

‘What do you want him for?’ he asked.

‘I’m a lawyer and I’d like to talk to him,’ I said.

‘Is he in trouble?’ he said.

He was the second person who thought he might have been in trouble.

‘No. No trouble,’ I said. ‘I just need to talk to him.’

‘Is it some inheritance thing?’ he asked. ‘Has some aunt left him a pile?’

‘Something like that,’ I said.

‘Well, I’m sorry, then, ’cause I don’t rightly know where he is no more.’

‘When did you last see him?’ I asked.

‘Years ago now,’ he said. ‘He went on holiday and just never came back.’

‘Do you know where he went?’

‘Somewhere exotic it was,’ said Pete. I thought that anywhere out of Oxfordshire might seem exotic to him. ‘Far East or something.’

‘Can you think exactly when that was?’

‘It was during the last England tour to South Africa,’ he said with some certainty. ‘Him and me had a wager on the result and he never came back to pay me when England won. I remember that.’

‘Cricket tour?’ I asked.

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Dead keen on his cricket was Jack. His name was actually spelt with a “ques” at the end, like that famous South African cricketer Jacques Kallis. He was proud of that. But we all just called him Jack.’

‘Do you know anything else about him?’ I asked. ‘Does he have any family here, or did he own a house or a car?’

‘No idea,’ he said. ‘I only knew him from in here, and at the cricket club. He could bowl a bit. Spinners, mostly.’

‘Thank you so much, Pete,’ I said to him. ‘You’ve been most helpful.’

He made no move to stand up or to leave our table.

‘Sorry,’ I said, understanding. ‘Can I buy you a drink?’

‘That would be handsome,’ he said.

I waved at the publican, who came over.

‘Would you please give Pete here a drink on me,’ I said. ‘And one for yourself as well.’

They went off together to the bar and, subsequently, Pete waved a full pint in my direction. I nodded at him and smiled. Eleanor was trying very hard not to completely collapse in a fit of giggles.

‘Stop it,’ I said to her under my breath while trying hard not to join in. ‘For goodness’ sake, stop it.’ But she didn’t, or she couldn’t.

∗

My taxi arrived at ten fifteen sharp, as I had ordered, and it whisked me off to Oxford, leaving Eleanor waving to me from the pub car park. The evening had flown by and I wasn’t at all ready to go when the driver arrived. But he couldn’t wait. He had other trips booked after mine.

‘Now or never,’ he’d said.

I was tempted to say never, but I would just have to wait until Monday, or Tuesday.

Eleanor and I kissed each other goodnight firmly, with open mouths. It was a revelation to me after such a long time. Something stirred inside me and I so reluctantly struggled into the back seat of the taxi to be borne away from her to the City of Dreaming Spires. I, meanwhile, was dreaming of the future, and especially of Monday, or Tuesday.

CHAPTER 15

I spent an hour early on Saturday connected to the internet, dealing with my e-mails, paying bills and generally managing my bank account. I also looked up when England had last played cricket on tour in South Africa. The rest of the morning was spent going through, yet again, the boxes of papers for the case. By now I knew many of them off by heart but one or two of them were new since I had last been through them.

At last, after several more threatening requests, the bank had finally produced Millie Barlow’s bank statements and I spent quite a while examining these. They did indeed show that Millie had a regular payment into her account over and above her salary from the equine hospital veterinary practice. And Scot’s statements showed that the money didn’t come from him, or at least it didn’t come from his bank account.

The amounts weren’t that big, just a few hundred every month, and, from the statements that had been sent by the bank, I was able to tell they had been paid to her for at least a year and a half before she died. But I didn’t have any information for before that.

I thought back to when I had met her parents at Scot Barlow’s house. Were they likely to have been sending their daughter money? One never knew. Their ill-fitting clothes, their cheap coach travel and their simple ways didn’t necessarily mean they had no spare cash. It might just mean they were careful with their money, and there was no crime in that.

Scot, meanwhile, had been doing very well indeed, thank you very much. Almost all his deposits were from Weatherbys, the racing administrators, who paid all the riding fees and win bonuses to owners, trainers and jockeys. There had been a few other minor deposits but nothing that amounted to much. Scot had been at the top of his profession and earning accordingly, but the statements indicated that there was nothing unusual in any of his transactions, at least nothing that I had been able to spot.

I met with Bruce Lygon on Saturday afternoon and we fairly gloomily went through the prosecution case once again. At first glance the evidence seemed overwhelming but, the more I looked at it, the more I began to believe that we had a chance to argue that Mitchell had no case to answer. Everything was circumstantial. There was no proof anywhere in their case that our client had ever been to Honeysuckle Cottage, let alone killed its owner.

‘But the evidence does show,’ Bruce said, ‘that whoever killed Barlow used Mitchell’s pitchfork as the murder weapon, was wearing Mitchell’s boots as he did it, probably drove Mitchell’s car from the scene, and,’ he emphasized, ‘also had access to Mitchell’s debit card slips.’

‘But that doesn’t mean it was definitely Mitchell who did it,’ I said.

‘What would you think if you were on the jury?’ he said. ‘Especially when you add in the fact that Mitchell hated Barlow. Everyone knew it, and Mitchell had often been heard to threaten to kill Barlow in exactly the manner in which he died.’

‘That’s why we have to argue that there’s no case to answer,’ I said. ‘If it goes to the jury we are in deep trouble.’

On Sunday, I went by train to have lunch with my father in his bungalow in the village of Kings Sutton. He came down to the village station to collect me in his old Morris Minor. He had always loved this old car and there was nothing he adored more than tinkering for hours with the old engine beneath the bulbous bonnet.

‘She’s still going well, then?’ I said to him as the car made easy work of the hill up from the station.

‘Never better,’ he said. ‘The odometer has just been round the clock again.’

I leaned over and saw that it read just twenty-two miles.