“Where in the trash?” He was beginning to lose what little patience he had.

“At home, last weekend, in the house wheelie-bin,” I said. “But the men have been to empty it since then, so it’s probably somewhere on a Warwickshire council tip by now.”

“Didn’t you think it was odd that he would carry his garage-door opener halfway round the world?” the chief inspector asked.

“Not really,” I replied. “He had just told me that he was my father, who I believed had died thirty-seven years ago when I was a baby. Now, I admit I thought that was odd.”

“Are you now telling me more lies?” he said.

“No, of course I’m not,” I said crossly. “I’ve come here to help you with an e-fit. Don’t you think I want you to catch my father’s killer?”

“I’m not so sure that you do,” he said slowly. “And, Mr. Talbot, don’t go away anywhere without telling us first.”

“Why not?” I asked him sharply. “Am I under arrest or something?”

“Not yet, no,” he said. “Not yet.”

Producing the police e-fit was easy. I had dreamed so much about Shifty-eyes that I had little trouble transferring the image in my head to a picture on a computer. The young “e-fit technician,” as he was called, was an expert.

“A little bit wider,” I said about the man’s face.

The technician turned the wheel on his computer mouse with his right forefinger, and the face in front of me squeezed in or stretched out until it was just right. His eyes were added, rather too close together for the width of the face, and then a nose, mouth and ears, each in turn adjusted in height, width and thickness by the rotation of the mouse wheel. Finally, short, straight fair hair was grown instantly and made to stand upright on the top of the head.

Shifty-eyes, or Kipper as Paddy Murphy had called him, looked out at me from the screen, and it sent a shiver down my back.

“That’s it,” I said.

“Great,” the technician replied, punching the SAVE button on his keyboard. “The chief inspector will be delighted.”

I doubted that, I thought.

I wondered if my image was anything like any of those produced by the other witnesses. But I had an advantage over them. I’d not just seen him in the Ascot parking lot, I’d seen him again in Sussex Gardens, and without his hoodie and scarf.

By the time I arrived back at Station Road, peace had broken out between the sisters.Alice had conceded that Sophie would be allowed to enter her own kitchen to help with the dinner preparations, and Sophie, in her turn, had agreed to allow Alice to do all the cleaning up after her. It seemed like an excellent deal to me, especially as all I had to do was eat.

“We’re having Thai green chicken curry and sticky rice,” said Sophie with a flourish. “They never once served spicy food in the hospital, and I’m desperate for some. Alice and I walked down to the shops while you were out.”

“Great,” I said, meaning it.

“Where did you go?” she asked.

“Banbury,” I said.

“What for?”

Quick, think!

“I went to see someone who has a new device which he wants us to buy to put on our computer, at the races.”

“Oh,” she said, uninterested. “And did you buy it?”

“No,” I said. “It wasn’t much good, and it was too expensive.”

What was I doing? Lying to the police was one thing, but lying to Sophie was quite another. I didn’t like it. And it would have to stop. This whole secret-agent circus had to stop, and soon. Just as soon as Shifty-eyes was arrested for my father’s murder and the police, in the person of Detective Chief Inspector Llewellyn, got off my back.

I spent much of Tuesday morning sitting in my little office doing some research, both on the Internet and using the two printed volumes most familiar to anyone in racing: the Directory of the Turf and Horses in Training.

I wasn’t really sure what I was looking for.

First, I searched back through the online editions of the Racing Post until I found the piece I had read about a horse dying. The horse had been called Oriental Suite, and, according to the newspaper, he had died as a result of complications arising from a bout of severe colic. Oriental Suite had won the Triumph Hurdle, a high-class hurdle race for four-year-old novices, going away from his rivals up the Cheltenham hill last March. He had been tipped to be a future Champion Hurdler. The obituary quoted the horse’s owner as being distraught over the untimely death. Racing, he declared, had been cruelly robbed of a future megastar.

If Paddy Murphy was right and the horse had been switched and therefore wasn’t actually dead, the real truth was not that racing had been cruelly robbed of a future star, but that an insurance company had been cruelly robbed of a reasonable-sized fortune.

I removed from the top drawer of my desk the photocopies of the horse passports I had found in my father’s rucksack. One of them was for a bay horse with the name Oriental Suite. I looked up Oriental Suite on the Racing Post website. In his short life, he had won nearly two hundred thousand pounds in prize money. No wonder he’d been well insured.

But why would anyone want to effectively kill off his potential champion steeplechaser? Many owners spent their whole lives, and often most of their wealth, trying to find themselves a champion horse. Perhaps it was all down to cash flow, or maybe the owner believed he could have his cake and eat it too-collect both a big insurance payout and still have the horse go on to be a champion under a different name.

“What are you up to?” Sophie asked, coming in and standing behind me, stroking my back.

“Just researching the runners for the coming week,” I said.

Bookmakers, as well as regular punters, needed to keep abreast of all the winners and losers if they were to make a living from other people’s folly.

“Do you want a coffee?” Sophie asked. “That is if Miss Ugly Sister down there will let me into my own kitchen.”

“Now, now, Cinders,” I said, laughing. “If Alice was one of the Ugly Sisters, she wouldn’t let you leave the kitchen, not keep you out of it.”

“I know you’re right, dearest Buttons,” she sighed. “But she’s beginning to drive me nuts.”

We looked at each other in surprise and then both burst out laughing at what Sophie had said. Did it prove she wasn’t nuts anymore?

“I’ll have a word with her, if you like,” I said.

“No, no, don’t do that,” she said. “I know she means well, but she’s so… intense. I feel I have to be so careful not to upset her while she is trying so hard not to upset me.”

“Go and tell her that,” I said. “She’ll understand.”

“I’ll try,” she said, and went out.

I went back to using the Internet and did some more research, including, amongst other things, looking up the declared runners for the coming week. I also used it to try to look up anything about valuable horses that had recently died in unusual or mysterious circumstances. But there was precious little information to be found.

In spite of being strong and physically fit, Thoroughbred racehorses were actually quite delicate creatures, and, sadly, many of them died unexpectedly from injury or disease. Such events, while often being disasters for the horse’s owner and trainer, were unlikely to be newsworthy unless it was the death of a potential champion such as Oriental Suite.

After twenty minutes or so, I began to wonder whether or not my cup of coffee was coming, so I went down the stairs to find out. As always, I carefully avoided treading on step three.

Alice and Sophie were both in tears, sitting at one end of the kitchen table, hugging each other. My mug of coffee stood alone at the other end, getting cold. I said nothing but walked over, picked it up and drank down some of the lukewarm brown liquid.

“Oh,” said Sophie, dabbing her eyes with a tissue, “I’m so sorry.” She was more laughing than crying. “I forgot. Alice and I have been talking.”