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she said.

      We followed her into a vast kitchen complete with granite worktops, slate floor and the aroma of fresh bread. It was the kind of kitchen you see in those awful, aspirational homes magazines at the dentist, the ones designed to make you dissatisfied with your perfectly adequate house – if indeed you have an adequate house, which I didn’t.

      Grace installed us at the table and asked if we wanted coffee. I nodded and she popped a sparkling burgundy capsule into a sleek, black machine.

      ‘I know they’re an ecological disaster, but…’ She looked round and shrugged. I shrugged back – the shrug that defined the whole of Western civilisation.

      She presented us with coffee, disappeared from the room, and reappeared a few moments later. ‘He’s outside staring at his fish. Would you like to go out or shall I bring him in?’

      Jai and I exchanged a look. ‘Staring at fish?’ I said. ‘I thought he had urgent work to do.’

      ‘It’s based on the optimum efficiency of the human mind. He works for a set time, takes a short break, walks, works, stares at his fish. He has a timetable mapped out so he operates at peak performance. He’s a wonderfully diligent and organised man.’

      ‘Wow. Okay.’

      ‘Here he is.’

      A man stepped through an open patio door from a bright garden and approached the kitchen table, notepad and pen in hand, as if he’d come to interview us. He had a startled look, with prominent raised eyebrows above pale blue eyes, and light blond hair with just a hint of his son’s ginger. ‘Can we be quick?’ he said. ‘I have some urgent drafting to do.’

      Grace slipped out of the kitchen.

      ‘So we gather,’ I said. ‘And we have a possible murder to investigate. So let’s press on, shall we?’

      He pulled out a wooden chair and sat facing us. He steepled his fingers in a show of confidence but couldn’t seem to pull it off, so resorted to picking up his pen and making as if to write notes on my performance. ‘If I don’t get this draft done by the end of—’

      ‘When did you last see Peter?’

      He glanced at Jai and then gave me a huffy look. ‘On Friday at work.’

      ‘And did you notice anything unusual?’

      ‘No, but I only said hello in the corridor. He looked fine.’ He tapped his pen against the table.

      ‘Did you and Peter get along well?’

      ‘Yes, well enough. We went into business together.’

      ‘But that was five years ago. What about recently? I understand Peter had changed recently.’

      Edward cleared his throat. ‘He seemed to have become a little careless, yes.’

      ‘And what were the implications of that?’

      ‘It could be very serious in our profession.’

      With some witnesses, you could set them going and they’d be off like the Duracell bunny, revealing every tiny detail of the victim’s usually tedious and irrelevant life. The problem was shutting them up, but at least you had something to work with. This was clearly not going to be the case with Edward.

      ‘Why is it so serious?’

      ‘Patent work is very deadline-driven. In most branches of the law, if you miss a deadline, you can extend it, no one’s harmed. But we have certain deadlines where if we miss them, that’s it. An invention potentially worth millions isn’t protected any more. And if the client’s disclosed the invention, you can’t ever get valid protection.’

      ‘Had Peter missed one of these deadlines?’

      ‘Look I can’t really say much. It’s all confidential. I don’t see what this has to do with his death.’

      ‘Why? What do you think is relevant to his death?’

      ‘I really have no idea.’ He wouldn’t catch my eye.

      ‘So how do you know this isn’t? And don’t you care?’

      Edward put his pen down and then picked it up and started the annoying tapping again. ‘Yes, of course I do. I am sorry about Peter but he had been a pain in the neck recently. I’m not going to pretend otherwise.’

      ‘So, had he missed an important deadline?’

      Edward sighed. ‘He may have done.’

      ‘Where were you yesterday?’

      ‘I was in work all day. I didn’t even go out at lunchtime.’

      ‘Why do you think Peter got careless?’

      ‘I don’t know. I wondered if he was drinking. Not in the daytime but in the evening, and then feeling under the weather in the daytime.’

      ‘Why were you going through his files when he was on holiday?’

      Edward blushed and the pen froze mid-tap. ‘Oh, that.’

      ‘Yes, that.’

      ‘I was checking he was on top of his work. Which he wasn’t. Or his partnership duties.’

      ‘What partnership duties?’

      ‘Look, can we continue this another day? It’s bad enough having to take on half Peter’s clients without losing more time.’

      ‘Tell me what partnership duties he’d neglected.’

      ‘He hadn’t renewed our professional indemnity insurance, which was pretty serious given the state of his work. We trusted each other to do things. You have to in a small firm – you can’t be checking up on each other all the time or you’d never get your work done.’

      ‘Was that serious? Not renewing the insurance? I imagine it was.’

      Edward gave a humourless laugh. ‘You could say so. We’re still a traditional partnership, which means we have unlimited liability. We could be personally bankrupted by one of his mistakes.’

      ‘Was that what you and Felix Carstairs were discussing?’

      ‘What do you mean?’

      ‘I heard you had discussions, just the two of you.’

      Edward put the damned pen down and looked straight at me, but didn’t quite meet my gaze. ‘We were concerned about Peter’s performance, yes, and this indemnity insurance issue was very alarming.’

      ‘Did you consider asking Peter to leave?’

      ‘It’s not that simple. We’d have had to find a lot of money.’

      ‘Why would you have had to find a lot of money to get him to leave?’ I leaned forward in my chair.

      ‘We’d have had to buy his share of the business – worth several hundred thousand. And we’d probably have had to pay him a year’s salary, too.’

      ‘And do you have to buy his share in the business from his beneficiaries now?’

      ‘Yes. But we have insurance to cover that. He didn’t let that one lapse.’

      ‘You’ve checked that already?’

      ‘Of course.’

      ‘So, it’s actually quite convenient that he’s dead?’

      Edward examined his hand, the one without the pen. ‘Yes, actually, it is. It’s easier to pick up his clients between us than to manage his mistakes.’ He wiped his large forehead. ‘Look, they’ve probably told you I’m not good with people and I’m also not a good liar. It is convenient that he’s dead but I didn’t kill him.’

      I sat back in my chair. ‘Okay, we’ll leave it at that for today. We may need to talk to you

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