‘I don’t suppose you had a client called Melissa Conway?’ I don’t know why I asked about her. It had come as a surprise to me when James had mentioned she was living in Woodbridge and on the memory stick Cecily had said that she used the spa.

‘Melissa? Yes, there was a lady called Melissa – she was in all the time. But her name was Melissa Johnson, I think. She rented a house on the estate.’

That was her, but she had gone back to her maiden name.

‘Why do you want to know about her?’ Lionel asked.

‘She was married to Alan Conway,’ I said.

‘Oh! I get it. Well, since you mention it, she actually came in on the Wednesday or the Thursday evening before it happened. I remember because she was in a foul mood. No fun at all.’

‘Do you know what had upset her?’

He shrugged. ‘No idea.’

‘So how did you end up at Branlow Hall?’ I asked. ‘How did you get the job?’

‘Yeah, well, I didn’t know what I was walking into. I came to London from Perth about eleven years ago. That’s Perth, Australia, of course. My mother was English. I rented a room in Earls Court and got a job as a personal trainer. I was only twenty but I’d done a CEC course at a uni in Perth and I was lucky. I landed on my feet. I had a few private clients and they recommended me to others. Even so, London’s an expensive place and I had a devil of a job keeping my head above water. You have no idea of the sort of stuff I got up to! Then I was training this guy and he mentioned he’d just got back from Branlow Hall and they were looking for someone to run their spa. It seemed a good way to earn some cash, so I went for an interview and I got it.’

‘Who was the client who recommended you?’ I asked.

‘I don’t remember.’

‘Were all your clients men?’

‘No. They split about fifty-fifty. Why do you ask?’

‘No reason. Go on. Why were the Trehernes such bad employers – apart from the pay?’

‘Well, the pay was the main thing, but they really made you put in the hours. Ten hours a day, six days a week. I’m not even sure that’s legal, is it? And there were no perks. Everything you ate in the hotel you had to pay for and although the food was cheap, they gave you zero discount in the bar. You weren’t even allowed to go in if there were any guests there.

‘And that thing they were doing with crims! The Youth Offender Programme, they called it, but that wasn’t what it was about. It was the pits. They were paying Stefan way under the minimum wage and he was on call literally twenty-four hours a day. He was meant to be general maintenance but they had him doing all the shit jobs, including the toilets, the gutters on the roof, the trash … you name it. He got really sick once and they didn’t even want to give him the day off. They had him over a barrel, you see. If he complained, they could throw him out. He was Romanian. He had a prison record. He wasn’t going to get another job – and certainly not without a reference from them. They knew that. They were bastards.

‘And then there was Lisa Treherne.’ He shook his head in admiration. ‘The older daughter. She was a real piece of work.’

‘She accused him of stealing.’

‘She knew he wasn’t a thief. That was Natasha.’

‘The maid?’

‘Yes. Everyone knew that. She was shameless! Shake hands and check you’re still wearing your watch. But Lisa was playing the same power game as her dad. She wanted Stefan.’

‘Wanted him … how?’

‘How do you think?’ Lionel looked at me disdainfully. ‘Lisa had the hots for him. A nice hunk of twenty-two-year-old Eastern European flesh. She couldn’t keep her eyes off him.’

Could I trust what Lionel was telling me? According to him, Melissa was angry, Lawrence was crooked, Stefan was exploited and Lisa was rapacious. He didn’t have a good word to say about anyone. And yet I thought back to the meeting I’d had with Lisa in the dining room at Branlow Hall. She’d been fairly vengeful herself. ‘Hiring Stefan Codrescu was a mistake from the very start. I said so at the time, although nobody listened to me.’ And what was it her father had said? ‘You liked him to start with. You spent lots of time with him.’ I’d made a note of the contradiction. Perhaps Lionel had just explained it.

‘For what it’s worth, Lisa tried it on with me as well,’ he continued. ‘She was always in and out of the spa, and I’m telling you, mate, the sort of workout she wanted didn’t involve anything I’d been taught in Perth.’

‘Did she have a relationship with Stefan?’ Even as I asked the question, I thought it was unlikely. Surely, if they had been sleeping together, it would have come out at the trial.

Lionel shook his head. ‘I wouldn’t call it a relationship. Stefan didn’t fancy her any more than I did.’ He pointed at his mouth. ‘You know, she had that scar, and even without it she wasn’t exactly Miranda Kerr. But they were having sex, if that’s what you mean. The poor bugger couldn’t say no to her! After all, she was more or less running the hotel. She had complete power over him.’

‘Did he talk to you about it?’

‘No. He never talked about that sort of stuff. But he was always miserable when she was around and one time I actually saw them together.’

Another couple of people had come into the café. Lionel leaned forward conspiratorially.

‘It happened about two or three weeks before the murder,’ he said. ‘I’d finished at the spa and I was doing a quick run around the grounds. It was a warm night. Beautiful. There was a full moon. So I ran and did some stretches and then I decided to do some chin-ups. There was a tree I liked to use. It had a branch at the perfect height. It was in this wood – near to Oaklands, the cottage where Melissa lived, as a matter of fact. So there I was, making my way along, when suddenly I heard noises and the next thing I knew, there they were the two of them, him on top of her, both of them stark naked in the grass.’

‘Are you sure it was Lisa and Stefan?’

‘That’s a fair question, Sue. It was night and there was a distance between us, and at first I got the idea it was Aiden having it away with his future sister-in-law, which would have been quite a laugh. But I’d worked out with Aiden and he’s got this big tattoo on his shoulder. He always called it his cosmic snake, but to me it just looked like a giant tadpole!’ He laughed. ‘Whoever the guy was out there, it wasn’t Aiden. He had bare skin – I’d have easily seen a tattoo in the moonlight.

‘Anyway, I didn’t want to hang around like some kind of perv, whoever it was out there, so I started to move away. And of course you’re going to guess what happened. I only stepped on a branch and the bloody thing went off like a gunshot. Well, that stopped them. The guy looked round and I saw his face as clearly as I’m seeing you now. It was definitely Stefan.’

‘Did he see you?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘You never talked to him about it?’

‘Are you kidding?’

I thought it through. ‘But I don’t understand,’ I said. ‘Lisa fired him a couple of weeks later. If they were having sex, why would she do that?’

‘I wondered about that. But my guess is that he’d told her to get lost. What she was doing was exploitation, no more, no less. Maybe he threatened to put in a complaint.’

I still hadn’t heard from Stefan Codrescu and I wondered how long it would take for my letter to reach him in jail. There was still the question of whether he would agree to see me, but it was critical that the two of us should meet. I needed to know everything that had happened between him and Lisa Treherne. She wasn’t going to say anything. Only he could tell me the truth.

‘You were with him on the Friday night,’ I said. ‘He got drunk at the party.’

‘That’s right.’ Lionel glanced at the clock on the wall. We had been talking for twenty minutes of our allotted half-hour. He drained his protein shake, leaving a green half-moon on his upper lip. ‘That wasn’t like Stefan. He could usually hold his liquor. But of course he’d just been fired, so maybe he was drowning his sorrows.’

‘You took him back to his room.’

‘That would have been about ten o’clock. We walked over to the stable block, which is where they put us up. I had the room next to his. I said goodnight and we both went to bed. I was pretty knackered myself, actually.’

‘What time did you get to sleep?’

‘I guess about ten or fifteen minutes later – but before you ask, I didn’t hear anything. I’m a heavy sleeper. If Stefan got up and went into the hotel, I’m afraid I can’t help you. All I can tell you is that he was lying on his bed when I left.’

‘Did you see him the next day?’

‘No. I was in the spa. He was helping with the wedding.’

‘Do you believe he killed Frank Parris?’

He had to think about that. Eventually, he nodded. ‘Yeah. Probably. I mean, the police found plenty of evidence and I know he was broke. He did a lot of online gambling. All these Romanians do. He often asked me to bail him out before he got paid at the end of the month.’

He looked at the clock again and got to his feet. Our time was up.