CHAPTER 33 -Something's disturbing

Part 1

Interview rooms in police stations are not known for their comforting, welcoming décor and warm, friendly atmosphere and Cowley Station Interview Room 3 that Catherine Jarvis was impatiently waiting in was no exception. To call the room basic and spartan would be an understatement. The room was about twelve foot square and offered an immediate cloying feeling of claustrophobia as soon as one entered the room. There was no furniture save for a small wooden table in the middle of the room with four chairs, two on either side, and a small ashtray placed in the centre of the table. The walls were bare and painted a dull, uninspiring grey which may have been deliberately chosen to darken and lower the mood of any suspect brought to the room for questioning.

Catherine Jarvis had been sitting all alone for more than twenty minutes with just a lone, silent woman police constable for company who had been standing to attention by the door throughout that time. Catherine had attempted to engage the constable in conversation several times but all to no avail. WPC Foster had shown no inclination to strike up anything bordering on a discussion and had steadfastly refused to answer any of Catherine's questions about how long she was going to be kept waiting, why she had even been brought there in the first place and where could she get hold of a complaints form to fill out about the appalling treatment she had suffered at the hands of the police.

Catherine Jarvis's patience was beginning to wear thin, as evidenced by her increasingly persistent heavy sighs, intermittent groans of frustration and drumming of her fingers on the table. Finally her wafer-thin patience snapped and the young woman got up from her chair and started to bear down menacingly on the WPC, who stiffened noticeably in preparation for an attempt by the suspect to get past her, when suddenly the door opened and DCI Thursday entered the room, thereby stopping Ms Jarvis dead in her tracks.

'Going somewhere, were you?' he asked coldly, his expressionless face glaring at Catherine who gave a slight gasp of surprise at the venom in the Chief Inspector's voice and scowled back at him resentfully. 'Sit back down, Ms Jarvis. I have a few more questions to ask you.'

'You've no right to keep me in here!' she cried as Thursday moved round to the other side of the table and sat down. 'I've done nothing wrong. This is an outrage. I intend to complain to the highest level about what has happened today.'

'You'll sit down and be quiet, if you know what's good for you, Miss. And as for 'I've done nothing wrong', well, that's not strictly true, is it?' Thursday stared intently at Catherine to look for any sign of a reaction and was gratified to spot the tiniest tic at the corner of her mouth and a very slight but noticeable intake of breath.

'What do you mean?' asked the young woman, her face momentarily displaying a touch of uncertainty.

'You've lied to us, haven't you, Ms Jarvis? And not for the first time, either.'

'I haven't lied to you. I've answered all your questions and co-operated fully with your enquiry.' Ms Jarvis had quickly regained her composure and her confidence and was looking Thursday defiantly right between the eyes.

'Really?' Thursday raised an eyebrow in astonishment and gazed down in front of him at the file which was open at the front page. 'You said in a previous interview that your father was still alive and living in Dorset and that you were regularly in touch with him.'

'That's correct,' said Catherine nodding her head.

'Well, it isn't true, is it? The man living in Dorset whom you pop down to see every now and then isn't your father. He's your stepfather, isn't he?'

Thursday glared accusingly at Catherine in silence and waited for her to wriggle out of this unmasking of the truth. The young woman seemed to be making a huge effort not to turn red with embarrassment at being found out so easily and she took her time to respond.

'He's my father in every real sense of the word, Chief Inspector!' she exclaimed, her eyes flashing angrily at Thursday. 'You're just being pedantic.'

'No, I'm not, Miss. We are exploring the very real possibility that Ronald Fraser may have been murdered by his illegitimate daughter and when the question was put to you, you categorically denied that Ronald Fraser was or even could have been your father because you claimed your father was still alive and kicking. We now know that isn't true and that you have deliberately tried to mislead us and deceive us. Why did you lie to us, Ms Jarvis?'

Catherine Jarvis bowed her head for a moment and stared hard down at the floor, possibly exploring the options open to her of coming clean, lying through her teeth yet again or some compromise of these two extremes. 'I never really knew my father, Chief Inspector. I was still only little when he walked out on my mother and left her to look after me on her own. She didn't cope very well. She more or less gave up on me and turned to drink. I was put into care. Can you imagine how that felt, to be abandoned by both my parents when I was still a child?'

Thursday listened in silence as Catherine Jarvis continued with her tale of misery and woe and for the first time in his interviews with her he actually believed what she was telling him. The emotion that poured out of her as she was speaking seemed totally genuine and he didn't think she was capable of acting out that level of anguish, pain and disappointment for a sustained period of time.

'When my mother and father adopted me when I was thirteen, it was the first time in my life I actually believed someone cared about me, loved me even. They understood what I had gone through before coming to them. They knew they needed to be patient with me and give me time to get used to being loved and cared for properly. It took a while for me to trust them completely but eventually I learned that I could. To all intents and purpose, from then onwards, they were my real Mum and Dad, in my eyes anyway. My real parents, well, my biological parents I should say, had never existed to my way of thinking. My life only started for real when I was adopted.'

'Why couldn't you have told us about this before?' Thursday was beginning to feel genuine sympathy for the young woman and could accept at face value everything she had just told him about the early years of her life but he couldn't understand why she had been so determined to keep it a secret. There was no shame in being adopted nowadays, after all. Maybe a decade or two back, it might have been more difficult to be open and public about something like that but not now, not in the considerably more enlightened 1960s, when unmarried couples openly lived together, when adoption was becoming increasingly more common and popular and when the repressed, post-war austerity of the 1950s had steadily been replaced by a more optimistic and vibrant society.

'Believe it or not, I was ashamed, Chief Inspector.'

'Ashamed of what?' Thursday asked, intrigued but still somewhat suspicious that she might quickly revert to her old ways and start lying through her teeth again, incapable of being truthful for too long.

'The industry I work in, despite how it might appear on the surface, is still very conservative. It's nowhere near as tolerant, free and easy as the people the newspapers write about, you know. I was afraid if word got out about my…difficult past, it might be held against me. It was nobody's business but mine who my real parents were, what sort of parents they were and how much they had messed up my life when I was younger. I didn't want the owners of the paper to find out and look down on me as …I don't know, someone not of good stock or from a reliable background.'

Thursday's stance softened momentarily as he listened to this tale of childhood suffering followed by teenage redemption and adult regeneration. 'But, forgive me, Ms Jarvis, you never saw your father again after he left you and your mother?'

Catherine shook her head solemnly. 'No, Chief Inspector, I never saw him again and I never wanted to. I wanted to forget all about him, pretend he had never existed. He obviously didn't care about me. Why should I care about him?'

'But if that's so, why couldn't Ronald Fraser have been your father if you had lost track of him ever since he ran off? After all those years, you might not have recognised him at first. Only later, after you had started to get to know him.'

Catherine smiled and almost burst out into laughter. 'Ronald Fraser could never have been my father in a million years. My mother did occasionally talk to me about him during her few sober moments, you know, when I was old enough to understand these things. My biological father was a lazy, selfish, useless, good for nothing layabout. For all our differences, Ronald Fraser was an intelligent, hard-working, caring kind of guy. In short, the complete opposite to the sort of man my real father was. Ronald Fraser was as likely to have been my real father as you are.'

'Hmm,' snorted Thursday at Catherine's surprise suggestion but he concurred with the young woman's conclusion. It seemed impossible to believe that she could have wanted to stay at the Mail and work with her real father if she had discovered him there which seemed unlikely in the extreme. He decided he had got out of her as much as he needed to so he thanked Catherine for her honesty on this occasion and decided he wouldn't pile on the agony by charging her with wasting police time but merely warned her in the strongest possible tones never to lie to the police again in any circumstances. Catherine accepted the rebuke with as much grace as she could muster and left the room without a word.

Part 2

While Thursday was forcing the truth out of a reluctant Catherine Jarvis, Morse was having a fine old time with Moira Stewart in Interview Room 1. Unlike her Oxford Mail colleague, Moira was demonstrably unwilling to sit and wait in silence for someone to come and interview her. No sooner had she been shown into the room and told to sit and wait than she had demonstrated a refusal to cooperate to any degree and follow the instructions she had been given by WPC Trewlove who had been detailed to take over observation duties in the interview room.

She paced up and down the room, screaming and shouting in anger and directing a torrent of abuse at Trewlove who remained impressively impassive standing by the door, interrupting her studied silence only to tell Moira to calm down, sit down and remain silent until someone came to talk to her. This soon became a persistent occurrence, so much so that Trewlove had to threaten to call for back up and put the handcuffs on her again if she didn't do as she said and quieten down. The threat of being handcuffed once more finally seemed to do the trick to some extent in that Moira Stewart eventually threw herself down on one of the chairs like a little schoolgirl having a temper tantrum and contented herself with muttering dark threats and promises under her breath about how she would make everyone pay for the humiliation they were putting her through.

When Morse eventually opened the door and entered the room, he was met with an avalanche of hysterical protests and complaints which he dealt with in his usual calm and controlled manner as if this was an everyday occurrence in his professional life which scarcely required him to raise so much as an eyebrow in surprise.

'Please sit down Miss Stewart,' he said tersely. 'I have only a few questions to ask you. The sooner we can get through them, the sooner you will be on your way. Screaming and shouting like that really isn't going to do you any good.'

Moira Stewart must have been knocked out of her stride by Morse's composed and controlled demeanour because she immediately stopped yelling and protesting and regained her seat which she had temporarily vacated as soon as Morse had entered the room. Her manner remained that of a sulky, pouting schoolgirl but at least the irritating screaming and shouting had ceased, much to Trewlove's relief. This young woman had really started to get on her nerves and she had begun to think that maybe a straight-jacket wasn't quite such a ridiculous idea after all.

'When we last spoke to you, you told us that on the night Ronald Fraser was killed, you left the pub with your friends around half past eleven and that you got back home at midnight.'

Morse looked up at Moira Stewart and fixed his expressionless gaze on the young woman who looked back at him with a surly expression that made her normally pleasant-looking face seem quite unattractive. At first he thought she wasn't going to answer but eventually she deigned to reply.

'Yes, that's what I said.'

'Well, we've spoken to the friends you were in the pub with that night and they all agree you left together well before eleven-fifteen.'

'Well they're wrong, Sergeant. It was definitely nearer eleven-thirty than eleven o'clock.'

'What? All of them are wrong, are you saying? You're right about the time you all left while all five of them are wrong? Is that really very likely, Ms Stewart? Is that what you expect us to believe?'

'I don't give a damn what you believe!' Moira Stewart almost spat out the words as her temporary calmness crumbled in front of this quiet policeman who seemed unshaken and unperturbed by her rising indignation and short-tempered outbursts. 'Eleven o'clock, eleven-thirty, what does a quarter of an hour's difference make to anything?'

'Oh, it could make all the difference in the world, Ms Stewart. It could be the difference between you having just enough time and opportunity to kill Ronald Fraser and get back home for midnight and not having enough time.'

'But I didn't kill him!' Moira Stewart looked at Morse, aghast at the suggestion. 'Why would I kill him? I had no reason to!'

'You might…if he was your real father, the father that had abandoned you more than twenty years ago.'

'I told you already. My father died five years ago from cancer.'

'We're still looking into that. We've not been able to corroborate that story yet.'

'It's not a story, it's the truth.'

'So you say, Miss Stewart.'

The two glared at each other from across the table, neither prepared to give way to the other, each holding their ground and refusing to budge an inch like two rutting stags who were battling one another for supremacy.

'Of course, you could have another reason for killing Ronald Fraser.'

'What reason? I didn't have a reason!'

'You might, if you were having a secret relationship with him and he told you he wanted to end it.'

Morse was winging it a little bit here, he knew that but he was keen to see what Ms Stewart's reaction would be to this suggestion.'

'I wasn't having a relationship with him. We were just …colleagues, friends, that's all. I've got a boyfriend anyway. I wouldn't cheat on him, especially not with a middle-aged man I work with. I've tried being in a relationship with someone I work with before. It didn't end well.' Moira Stewart was admirably calm in her response which surprised Morse who had expected her to go off on one again. He decided to return to the subject of the time of her departure from the pub on that fateful Friday night.

'So, to recap, you're no longer sure that you did leave the pub at half past eleven? Especially now your friends have sworn it was not long past eleven o'clock when you all left.'

'If you say so,' said Moira, grumpily as she sat back in her chair and let out a heavy sigh of exasperation and weary resignation. 'Either way it doesn't matter. I didn't kill him and you've no proof or evidence that I did. I haven't got a motive even if I might, at an absolute push, have had the opportunity.'

Morse was forced to concede reluctantly that Moira Stewart was right on that score. Unless they came across evidence to suggest or confirm that she and Fraser had been having a relationship which had turned sour, he couldn't see how they could detain her any longer. They hadn't a scrap of evidence against her, just one or two half-baked theories which wouldn't stand up to scrutiny by any half decent barrister or lawyer, Regrettably he had to let her go which he did after completing his notes of the interview.

'Would you like me to fetch you an official complaints form?' he asked as Ms Stewart stood up and turned to go.

'Don't bother,' she said with a snort of derision. 'I expect it would only land up in the bin, wouldn't it?' With that parting shot delivered, the young woman stormed out of the room, leaving Morse and Trewlove to exchange glances of amusement before Trewlove left the room to run after Moira and show her the way out of the building.

When Morse got back into the main CID office he went straight to join Thursday in his room and from Morse's gloomy expression Thursday could guess that his colleague had not had any more luck with Moira than he had enjoyed with Catherine Jarvis.

'Nothing doing?' he asked and when Morse shook his head Thursday rubbed his eyes with his hands and gave a grimace which reflected his mood that morning. It had not been a good day so far and he was in need of a pick me up.

'Lunch?' he suggested and Morse nodded swiftly. Like his guvnor, Morse was feeling deflated and badly in need of a pint or two to put a spring back in his step and oil the cogs of his intellect which appeared to have gone to sleep for the time being.

Part 3

'I heard you had a bit of excitement this morning,' said Fancy to Trewlove when they bumped into each other in the station just before lunchtime.

'Blimey! News travels fast round here, doesn't it?' replied Trewlove with a grin. 'You could say that.' She gave George a quick summary of her tussles with Moira Stewart at the Oxford Mail and in the interview room and he chuckled along with her during her account.

'I wish I'd been there to see that. That would have been fun to watch.'

'Oh, so you would have just stood by and left me to deal with her on my own, would you?'

'No, I didn't mean that, Shirl,' he protested immediately, catching Trewlove's expression of disappointment and annoyance which she so expertly faked that he was completely taken in.

'I'm only teasing you, you idiot,' she said, shaking her head in amazement at how easy it was to pull his leg and get him on the defensive. 'You really are so easy to wind up, you know. You need to learn how to tell when people are being serious or just pulling your leg.'

Fancy gave her an embarrassed smile and nodded. 'Yeah, I know. You sound just like my Dad. He's always on at me for being too easy to take the mickey out of. He never stops winding me up and then has a go at me for being such a soft touch and an easy target.'

'Well, perhaps you should start listening to him a bit more, then. Sounds like he might have a point.' Trewlove genuinely wanted to help George to toughen up a bit and not be so easy to manipulate but the young man still took so much at face value, rarely spotting when someone was teasing him. He was an open book and too easily taken in, thought Trewlove, which was never a good trait for a police officer, faced with a daily ration of criminals always looking to lie through their teeth and lead the cops up the garden path with a succession of lies, half-truths and misdirection.

'Do you fancy going out for a spot of lunch?' asked Fancy, anxious to change the subject.

'I don't mind,' replied Trewlove. 'Are you thinking of taking me to some expensive restaurant, then? Or are we talking a pub lunch or a sandwich and a cup of tea at Lyons?'

Fancy stared hard at Trewlove looking for a tell-tale sign that she was having fun with him or was being deadly serious and still he couldn't be totally confident which it was. 'What would you like?' he asked, deciding to play it safe and avoid having to make a choice.

'Oh, shall we push the boat out and go to Lyons?' she said with a smile. 'Let's leave the posh restaurant for later in the week, at least until after you've been paid.'

Fancy grinned back at Trewlove and the two of them made their way to the front exit of the station, trotted down the steps and moved out into the busy street, joining the throng of fellow workers making their way to their chosen lunch destinations. They quickly made their way into the main commercial area of Oxford and within five minutes they were entering the popular Lyons establishment and asking for a table for two whereupon the girl at the counter showed them to a table in the corner.

As they sat down Trewlove had a quick look round, noticing how busy it was and realising how lucky they had been to find a table still free when she caught sight of a familiar face on the other side of the room. She smiled and waved across at Jim Strange who was sitting at a table with Claudine only twenty feet away. George was surprised to see Trewlove give such a friendly wave and instinctively followed the direction of her hand until he too recognised Jim who reluctantly gave an underwhelming wave back before quickly resuming his conversation with Claudine.

'I don't believe it!' whispered Strange. 'It's like they're all following us everywhere we go. We turn up at the pub and Morse and his woman are already there. We come here and who should walk in but George and Shirley. I'm starting to think they're deliberately keeping tabs on us, you know.'

Claudine looked at Jim with a mischievous smile and laughed. 'Oh, come on, Jim,' she said. 'I think you're becoming a bit paranoid, aren't you? Why would they be following us everywhere?'

'I don't know, Claudine but twice in two days is a bit more than just a coincidence, don't you think?

'So you don't believe in fate and luck, then? Everything has to happen for a reason, does it? There's no such thing as coincidence? Where's your soul? Where's your romantic side, Jim?'

Jim Strange looked across at the laughing, smiling, young French woman and relaxed a little. Maybe she was right. Maybe it was just sheer bad luck that on his first two 'dates' with Claudine, he had been dogged by the unexpected presence of first Morse and his girlfriend and now Fancy and his. But it did feel as if fate, or whatever the hell Claudine wanted to call it, was cruelly conspiring against him before he had been given a chance to strike out on his own without any outside interference or intrusion.

'It's probably my training as a copper,' he admitted sheepishly. 'You're taught right from the start not to believe in coincidences. Everything has to happen for a reason. Cause and effect. Believe no one and suspect everyone.'

'Remind me not to get caught in the area the next time a dead body is found, then,' she laughed. 'You'll be arresting me on the spot, won't you? No coincidence that I just happened to be in the area at the time.'

Strange chuckled along with Claudine and successfully avoided blushing in response to her gentle teasing. 'I'm sure you're way too sensible and clever to get mixed up in anything like that. Besides, you wouldn't have to do much to convince me you were innocent.'

'I'll take that as a compliment, I think,' said Claudine, her eyes smiling and twinkling at Jim who bravely held her gaze and marvelled at the way her big, wide eyes seemed to hypnotise him into saying the most ridiculous things he would normally never dream of coming out with.

Over on the other side of the room, Fancy and Trewlove were inevitably talking about Jim and Claudine.

'Do you think that's his new girlfriend?' Fancy asked Trewlove, nodding vaguely in the direction of Strange and Claudine.

'How would I know, George?' replied Trewlove with a dismissive shrug of her shoulders. 'You know him better than me. Has he not said anything to you about her?'

'Not a dicky bird. I've not even heard a whisper about him getting a girlfriend around the station and you know how bloody difficult it is keeping a secret from that nosey bunch of gossip-mongers.'

'She must be a very new acquaintance, then, if nobody back at the station has even heard mention of her. She looks nice, though,' observed Trewlove, discretely looking over towards Claudine out of the corner of her eye. 'There's something different about her, I reckon.'

'How do you mean, different?' asked Fancy, as he attempted to follow suit and steal a surreptitious glance at the couple but he sadly lacked Trewlove's finesse and subtlety in comparison and ended up staring at the couple for way too long with the inevitable result that he caught Strange's eye and was forced to turn his head away sharply at the sight of Jim's sudden disapproving glare.

'Don't stare at them, George!' cried Trewlove in a loud whisper. 'You really need to work on your subtlety, you know. You do have a knack of blundering around like a bull in a china shop. Why don't you just go the whole hog and pop over there and ask Jim to introduce you to her?'

Fancy turned red and apologised for his clumsiness before inviting Trewlove to expand on what she meant by Jim's mystery companion being different.

'I don't know. She just seems unlike the sort of girl you normally see around here, that's all. She seems… more sophisticated, more worldly-wise than your average Oxford girl. I bet she doesn't work in a shop or a department store or in a typing pool. In fact I wouldn't be surprised if she wasn't even English.'

'Really?' Fancy whistled softly in amazement at Trewlove's bold suggestion. 'How the hell would Jim Strange have run into a foreign girl, then? There can't be many of them in Oxford, surely?'

'Unless she's an overseas student or someone working here on secondment from somewhere exotic like Paris or New York or Rome.'

'Wow! Do you really think so, Shirl?' Fancy's curiosity was well and truly aroused now and he had half a mind to follow Trewlove's tongue in cheek advice and go over and introduce himself to this mysterious new friend of Strange's were it not for the certain knowledge that Shirley would mercilessly beat him about the head with her handbag before he even got to within a foot of the couple.

'Who knows?' said Trewlove with an enigmatic expression. 'People have an endless ability for surprising you, George. I mean, look at you, for instance. Nobody would think to look at you that you were a sensitive, thoughtful, caring soul but then they don't know the real you, do they?'

Fancy smiled sheepishly back at Trewlove, in the sure and certain knowledge that she was definitely taking the mickey this time as even he himself wouldn't have had the audacity to describe himself in such glowing terms.

Part 4

While Fancy and Trewlove were living the high life at the Lyons tea shop, Thursday and Morse were tucking into their usual contrasting lunches in their favourite lunchtime pub. Thursday opened his sandwiches as soon as they had sat down at the table as he wanted to get Morse's inevitable spot on prediction of that day's sandwich filling over and done with quickly. He didn't want the suspense of waiting to see if Morse got it right as usual hanging over him like a black cloud.

'Ham and tomato,' said Morse without even looking up and he waited for Thursday to give him a confirmatory grunt before he started drinking his pint.

'Ok, now that's out of the way, we can concentrate on the case,' said Thursday before biting into his sandwich. He wondered idly if Morse would ever tire of this ritualistic game they always played at lunchtime but he suspected he probably wouldn't. It had become a habit and a pretty addictive habit at that. A harmless, inoffensive one, admittedly, provided he never breathed a word of it to Win who undoubtedly wouldn't see the funny side of it. He wondered briefly what Morse got out of it but decided in the end that it was probably just an amusing daily intellectual exercise for him, maybe a confirmation that his brain was functioning properly and that he wasn't losing control of his mental faculties. Oh well, if it kept his colleague sharp and alert throughout the working day, then who was he to complain?

'So, where do we go from here?' Thursday asked Morse who looked at him blankly and shrugged his shoulders.

'Back to the drawing board?' he suggested rather lamely and pessimistically to which Thursday reacted with a snort and a disconsolate shake of the head.

'We're going to need to come up with something soon, Morse,' he said. 'it's been two weeks already and we seem to be no nearer finding the killer than when we started.'

'We have made some progress, Sir.' Morse was keen to point out that the investigation hadn't all been downhill and that they knew a hell of a lot more now than they did at the start. 'We just need…I don't know, a lucky break, I suppose. We haven't exactly had the rub of the green so far. It's been a bit like an unsuccessful Treasure Hunt. So many times we've been on the right track but always just got there too late to find the object and pick up the next clue.'

Thursday nodded sympathetically. He understood what Morse meant. It did feel like they had been dogged throughout their investigation with rotten bad luck as if the fates had decided to punish them for all the times before when luck had been on their side. Like when Morse had been visited by a sudden flash of inspiration completely out of the blue to rescue them from the dead end they were going along and put them on the right path to enlightenment and the truth.

'Perhaps something will come to you with these clues you're so sure Vera Cooper left for us.'

Morse's eyes glazed over a touch at the mere mention by Thursday of these wretched, cursed clues found on Ronald Fraser's living room table. 'I'm beginning to wonder if she wasn't just playing games with us, Sir. I can't make head nor tail of any of them. Maybe I just want them to mean something whereas the truth of the matter is that they mean absolutely nothing at all.'

'Trust your first instincts, Morse,' said Thursday, trying to encourage his colleague whom he sensed was in danger of becoming a little dispirited and discouraged which was the last thing he needed his best man to be feeling. 'You've always gone with them before and they've rarely let you down.'

Morse was on the point of replying when they were interrupted by the arrival of DS Strange at the side of their table.

'Hello, Jim,' Thursday greeted Strange with surprise. 'It's a bit late for you, isn't it? Never mind, pull up a chair.'

'No, I won't stay, Sir. I just popped in on the off chance that the two of you might still be here.' Strange had a serious expression and even looked a touch worried, thought Morse and Thursday noticed it too.

'What is it, Jim? Something on your mind? Have you turned up something interesting?'

Strange quickly sat down next to Morse and leaned forward a little in a slightly conspiratorial manner which struck Morse as being unnecessarily melodramatic. 'You know those three books you found on the table in Fraser's living room when Vera Cooper was attacked?'

Morse nodded. 'Yes, what about them?'

'What was the title of the one about photography? Do you remember?'

'Of course I remember,' he replied defensively. He wasn't used to having his memory for case details being questioned. 'It was True Image.'

Strange let out a slight groan. 'Oh, bloody hell. That's what I thought it was.'

'What is it, Jim? What have you found out?' Thursday's heart started beating a little faster as the prospect of them having made a critical discovery which might turn their fortunes around was getting him all of a flutter.

'Look, I don't know if this means anything at all. It might be nothing. But I was out having dinner with some friends last night,' he paused for a moment as if he was trying to choose his next words very carefully. 'One of them who I've only just met came out with an unusual expression that sounded vaguely familiar, only I couldn't place where I'd heard it before.'

'But you have now?' asked Morse, intrigued even though he couldn't imagine where this was leading to.

'Yes,' nodded Strange ruefully. 'This woman I was talking to is a photojournalist. She was telling me about her job and she said the reason why she loved it so much was that it gave her the chance to take photos that showed the real world as it is, in all its ugliness and imperfections. She said what she always looked to capture in her photos was the True Image.'

Thursday instinctively raised an eyebrow and swapped glances with Morse whose eyes widened almost imperceptibly on hearing Strange's potted account of his conversation with Claudine. Thursday nodded slowly as he digested this information and swirled it around in his head.

'That's interesting, Jim. What more do you know about this girl?'

With a very heavy heart and with considerable reservations about what he was about to do, Strange spilled the beans on the young French girl whom he had only very recently met.

'Not much, Sir. She's in her early to mid-twenties, I'd say. She's a photojournalist, like I said. She's French. Her name is Claudine. And…' he hesitated before providing the most difficult piece of information he had to give,…'she's a friend of Joan's, Sir.'

Thursday remained admirably impassive upon hearing this fact and merely looked across at Morse who, if he was equally concerned, did a very good job of hiding it.

'OK, Jim,' Thursday finally replied with a firm, steady voice and a cool demeanour. 'Leave it with us and we'll look into it. Thanks for dropping by and letting us know. Good work.'

Strange nodded in silence, looked at Morse briefly, rose from his seat and made for the exit without saying another word.