‘Seemed to work. Heavy fine but you avoided the slammer. You have access to your car?’

‘Yes.’

‘So it’s not impossible for you to have gone to the Williamses’ bungalow to silence Amanda Williams who was threatening to expose your affair and silence her in the best way you could think of, and then to silence Max Williams because he was unfortunate enough to be there. And it’s not impossible for you to have slipped out of your house on Monday night to sanitize the crime scene, because there’d have been blood everywhere, and it’s not impossible to have slipped out of the house on Tuesday to bury the bodies.’

‘No.’ Sheringham smiled. ‘It’s not impossible but you’ll never prove it.’

‘Why, did you cover your tracks well enough?’

‘Because I didn’t do it.’

‘Double murder. Rotten thing to have on your conscience.’

‘I wouldn’t know.’

‘Did you have eye contact just before you killed them?’

‘Don’t answer that.’ Nathan Samual turned to Sheringham.

Then to Hennessey he said, ‘That’s a leading question, Chief Inspector.’

‘Which one was first, Sheringham?’

‘Really, Chief Inspector, I protest at this line of questioning.’

Samual turned to Hennessey and, somewhat imperiously, Hennessey thought, said, ‘Chief Inspector, I really have to insist that at this point you must decide whether to charge my client or terminate this interview until you have more evidence.’

‘There is a fingerprint in the bathroom.’ Hennessey leaned back in his chair. ‘That is evidence of unlawful entry.’

‘Not when my client has been a regular visitor to the house.’

Hennessey reached for the off switch of the tape recorder.

‘This interview is terminated at eleven-forty a.m.’ He switched off the machine, the spools stopped turning, the red light faded. ‘Very well, your client is free to leave the police station. But this is not the end of the matter, please understand that.’

Liam McCarty was a well-set man in his forties, short hair, grey suit. He was a sergeant in the City of York Police Drug Squad. He and Hennessey knew each other just well enough to be on first-name terms. Hennessey tapped on the door of McCarty’s office and sat in the chair in front of McCarty’s desk.

‘Come in and sit down,’ said McCarty with a smile.

Hennessey returned the smile. ‘Tim Sheringham?’ he said.

‘Sheringham…Sheringham…bells ring, George, but I can’t place him.’

‘Sheringham’s Gym. He’s a suspect in a code four one. We put his details into the computer and, among other things, he came up as an alert to you and the good men and women of the DS.’

‘Yes…that Sheringham.’ McCarty stood and walked to a filing cabinet, opened it, and extracted a file and handed it to Hennessey.

‘Well, well…’ Hennessey looked at the grainy black and white photographs in the file which showed Tim Sheringham and Max Williams talking to each other, on a park bench, inside a cafe, walking in the centre of York, walking the walls.

‘So they knew each other? He’s in much more deeply than he’s letting on. What’s the story here?’

‘Incomplete as yet, but we believe that Williams was funding an anabolic steroids racket, and I mean big time, putting up money for large-scale purchase of the stuff which Sheringham was then knocking out to the gym customers. We have a couple of guys in the gym, posing as members. Not enough evidence for an arrest yet, but we were focusing on Williams, we had him in for a quiz session…he’s easy meat, no bottle at all…we just let him know that he was under suspicion…just to put the pressure on him, a slight turn of the screw…we floated the possibility of immunity from prosecution in return for information and a statement implicating Sheringham. He’s a rising drug baron in the Famous and Faire and we’re looking to nip him before he rises much further.’

‘Talk about the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing.’

‘Well, you do know, we registered our interest, had it entered on the computer which is why he came up as an alert to us. Why, what’s happened?’

‘Just that the guy we believe Sheringham has filled in is none other than Max Williams.’

‘Well, there’s your motivation. If he thought Williams was going to blow the whistle on him, and Sheringham’s a nasty piece of work, he wouldn’t hesitate to off someone if he thought it would save him from a stretch as a guest of Her Majesty.’

‘It’s a far stronger motivation than we thought. Makes more sense - he was into Williams’s wife…playing away from home…he walked out on her and we believe Amanda Williams threatened to tell Mrs Sheringham of the affair she had had with her husband. We believe he killed her to stop that and her husband just got in the way somehow. Now it appears that he had a motivation to ice them both.’

‘Vanessa Sheringham’s a formidable woman. Have you met her?’ McCarty sat back in his chair. ‘She has some control over him, can’t work it out, but she’s the major-domo in the relationship.’

‘My sergeant’s interviewing her right now. But you know this could well clinch the case against Sheringham, he had a motive to murder them both. She was going to inform on him to his wife and he was going to inform on him to the police. What better solution than to batter the life out of the both of them?’

‘What better? Is he in custody?’

‘No. Don’t want to bring him in too early, don’t want to start the clock ticking until I’m on sure footing.’

‘And he’s not going anywhere…I can understand your caution.’

‘Have him in for another chat, though. We’ll be doing that in the light of this. What have you got on Sheringham from your perspective?’

‘Not enough. We believe that anabolic steroids have been seeping out of Sheringham’s Gym for a while now. Then one of our informers, he told us that a larger than normal amount had been shifted and the money bags was a guy called Williams. He has, or I should say, had, a reputation in the Vale for being something of a good touch for finance.’

‘He had.’

‘Anyway, all that consignment had been moved when we heard that Sheringham was twisting Williams’s arm, wanting him to fund a much larger shipment. Usual deal, Williams got his investment back plus twenty per cent once the stuff had been sold, but Williams may well be a good touch but he’s scared of the law. I got the impression that he was desperate to recover some money and was flirting with crime as a consequence, silly man. Anyway, we had him in here, a little off-the-record chat, offered him a deal, asked him to fund Sheringham, we’ll keep Sheringham under close surveillance, and when he makes the purchase we’ll pounce: we’ll get Sheringham and his supplier and the steroids, Williams gets his money back plus immunity from prosecution.’

‘Not a bad deal.’

‘That’s what we thought. He said he’d think it over. That was just last week sometime.’

Hennessey stood. ‘Well, thanks, Liam. Owe you one. Time for a second chat with Sheringham.’

Yellich found Vanessa Sheringham a very attractive woman. She would, he thought, be attractive in any man’s eyes. He thought her perhaps five foot eight or nine inches tall, angular features, high cheekbones, a mane of dark, glowing hair, blue eyes. She sat in the office of Sheringham’s Gym wearing a blue leotard with silver tights and a pair of blue and white trainers that didn’t look as’ though they were ever worn out of doors. She wore an expensive-looking wristwatch and equally expensive-looking engagement and wedding rings.

The watch and the rings were balanced by gold bracelets on the right wrist. By her smile, by the gleam in her eyes, Yellich knew that she was enjoying his eyes upon her. The woman knew she was beautiful. He disliked her intensely. It was Yellich’s experience that great beauty goes hand in hand with great cruelty and great selfishness. It had been his emotionally scarring experience to have once had an involvement with a photogenically beautiful woman, an actress, he remembered, and he had found her, and recalled her, as being self-obsessed and volatile, usually in public; making a meal out of issues other people would make light of. Yellich, looking back, if not at the time, saw her as a woman who would never know contentment, and would only approach happiness if she was on a pedestal, enjoying universal attention and approval, and getting her own way. She had been, in fact, the ugliest person to have crossed his life’s path. It had been a salutary lesson and while, since then, he had continued to enjoy the images of human female perfection, he did not yearn for any form of contact, physical or emotional, with a woman of this kind. And here in front of him was one such, enjoying his attention, and the annoying thing about it for Yellich was that she believed he was thinking exactly the opposite of what he was actually thinking.