Actually, I did think him stupid. But not as stupid as Roderick Ward. Fancy stealing from the father of your sister's boyfriend, especially when the boyfriend just happened to be a police detective-now, that was really stupid!

"Let's go back to Roderick Ward," I said. "Why did you send a note to Stella Beecher saying you had the stuff? What stuff? And how did you know Stella anyway?"

"I didn't," he said. "But I knew her address, because Roderick had said it was the same address he used, the one in Oxford."

"So what was all this about having the stuff? And hoping it was in time?"

"Fred Sutton had been harassing Roderick and me at an office we'd rented in Wantage, threatening us and so on."

I didn't blame him, I thought.

"He told me that he'd get a warrant for my arrest, and he'd use his police contacts to fit me up good and proper. He said I'd get ten years unless I gave him some papers he wanted about where his dad's money had gone."

"So why the note?" I asked.

"I made the copies of the papers, but he didn't come to collect them on the Monday morning as he'd said he would. He told me he'd definitely be at the office by eight, and I was waiting. But he didn't come all day, and Roderick didn't show up, either. I thought the two of them must have done a deal, and I would end up carrying the can. I was shit scared, I can tell you. And I had no other way of contacting him, so I sent the note."

So I had been wrong about "the stuff " being something to do with my mother's tax papers, and also "in time" had not been about before Roderick Ward's "accident," but about before getting an arrest warrant issued.

Never assume anything, I reminded myself.

But I'd been right about one thing: Alex Reece was indeed stupid.

"So how do you know that Fred Sutton and Stella killed Roderick Ward?" I asked him.

"Fred pitches up first thing the next day and demands the papers, but I told him to get stuffed. If he thought I was going to take the blame for what Roderick had been doing, he had another think coming. But he says Roderick's dead and I'll go the same way if I didn't give him the papers."

He paused only to draw breath.

"So I says to him that I didn't believe him that Roderick was dead. I told him he was only saying it to frighten me. He tells me that I should be frightened because they murdered him in the bath, but then he thinks better of it and claims it was an accident, that they'd only meant to scare him into telling them where the money had gone. But Fred says that Stella pulled his feet and his head went under and he just… died. Killed her own brother, just like that, Fred said. One minute they were asking him questions, the next he was dead."

"So did you give Fred the papers he wanted?" I asked.

"Yeah," he said. "But they wouldn't have done him much good. It's been ages since his money went, and they change the numbers and stuff all the time."

"'They'?" I asked.

He clammed up tight, pursing his lips and shaking his head at me.

But I'd been doing a lot of thinking while I'd sat waiting in Greystone Stables and in the Newbury coffee shop, and the more I had thought about it, the more convinced I had become.

"You mean Jackson Warren and Peter Garraway," I said. It was a statement rather than a question.

He stared at me with his mouth hanging open. So I was right.

But it had to be them.

"And who is Mr. Cigar?" I asked him.

He laughed. "No one," he said. "That was Roderick's idea. They all thought it a great joke as they puffed on their own great big Havanas."

"And Rock Bank Ltd?" I said. "Is that a myth too?"

"Oh no, that exists, all right," he said. "But it's not really a bank. It's just a Gibraltar holding company. When money comes in, it sits there for a while, and then leaves again."

"How much money?" I asked.

"Depends on how much people invest."

"And where does it go when it leaves Rock Bank?"

"I arrange a transfer into another Gibraltar account, but it doesn't stay long there either," he said. "I don't know where it goes then. I'm pretty sure it ends up in a secret numbered Swiss account."

"How long does it stay in Rock Bank?"

"About a week," he said. "Just long enough to allow for clearance of the transfer and for any problems to get sorted."

So Rock Bank (Gibraltar) Ltd had no assets of its own. No wonder the London-based liquidation firm was attempting to pursue the individual directors.

"And where does it come from?" I asked him.

"The mugs," he said, with a laugh.

"You're the mug," I said. "Look at you. You don't look quite so clever at the moment. And I bet you don't get to keep much of the money."

"I get my cut," he boasted.

"And how long in prison will your cut be worth when this all falls apart, as it surely must? Or when will Warren and Garraway decide you are no longer worth your cut? Then you might end up drowned in a bath, just like Roderick."

"They need me," he boasted again. "I'm the CPA. They need me to square the audit. You're just jealous of a successful business."

"But it's not a business," I said. "You are simply stealing from people."

"They can afford it," he said, sneering.

I wasn't going to argue with him, because there was no point. He probably agreed with the philosophy of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge.

"So how do Jackson Warren and Peter Garraway know each other?"

"I don't know," he said. "But they've done so for years. Long before I met them."

"And how long have you known them?" I asked.

"Too long," he said, echoing what he'd said to me at Isabella's kitchen supper.

"And how long is that?" I persisted.

"About four years."

"Was that when the fake-hedge-fund scheme started?"

"Yeah, about then."

"Is that what you were referring to when you had that little spat with Jackson Warren, you know, that night when I first I met you?"

"No," he said. "That was over his and Peter's other little fiddle."

"And what's that?" I asked.

"No way," he said, shaking his head. "I've already said too much as it is."

At least he was right on that count.

"You think the Revenue will investigate their other little fiddle?" I asked him, thinking back to the supper exchange between him and Jackson. What was it he had said then? Something about that there was no telling what else the Revenue might dig up. "And you're worried about that investigation finding out about everything else?"

It was a guess but not a bad one.

"Bloody stupid, if you ask me," he said.

I was asking him.

"Why take the risk?" I said.

"Exactly."

"So their other little fiddle is about tax?"

"Look," he said, changing the subject and completely ignoring my question, "I had a few beers on the flight, and now I desperately need to take a piss."

I thought back to my time in the stable. Should I make him wet himself just as I had been forced to do?

"Come on," he shouted at me. "I'm bloody bursting."

Reluctantly, I took a pair of scissors from my rucksack, leaned down and cut the ties holding Alex's hands behind his back.

"I might run away," he said, sitting up and rubbing his wrists.

"Not like that you won't." I pointed to the plastic ties that still bound his ankles together.

"Come on," he said. "Cut them too."

"No," I said. "You can hop."

Grudgingly, he pulled himself upright and hopped into the bathroom beneath the stairs.

I thought it unlikely that there would be a phone in the bathroom, but nevertheless, I took the precaution of removing the house telephone from its cradle in the kitchen. You can't dial out on one extension if another is off the hook, and his cell was still lying, switched off, on the kitchen counter where I'd left it.

Alex was taking his time, and I was beginning to think he might be trying to escape out of the bathroom window, when I heard the flush. Presently, he reappeared, hobbling out into the hall.