I sink my teeth into my lower lip till I’m close to breaking the skin. ‘I’m not sure, Clare. It’s a bit extreme. I mean, he must have had other options, mustn’t he? He could have applied for bankruptcy, for instance?’

‘Not if he wanted the insurance payout, he couldn’t.’

‘I really don’t think I was targeted,’ I say, absorbing an abrupt roll of emotion.

There’s brief silence. The air between Clare and me is charged, combustible.

‘There is another possibility,’ Kelvin says, with delicacy. ‘What if this isn’t an attempt to frame anyone, but just a long-term fraud that Jamie has somehow found himself tangled up in?’

‘Go on,’ Clare says.

‘Well, it’s true you’d get the payout more quickly if there was a murder conviction, but you’d probably still get it anyway, just later. It takes about seven years to get a legal declaration of death, according to my research.’

‘Seven years? Even with Kit working for an insurance company?’

‘Yes, I’ve looked at De Warr’s standard policy for employees and there’s nothing to suggest it would be paid ahead of normal schedules. It’s not like being in a plane crash, anything could have happened to him. The question is, is it worth seven years of living off grid?’

‘Exactly how much are we talking about?’ I ask. ‘Clare said over a million?’

‘It’s actually two, or near as dammit. The death in service cover adds a chunk. He’d really have to trust his wife, though. The cheque, when it comes, will be in the name of Melia Roper.’

Kit updated the details promptly then, I think. It seems a very long time ago, champagne in Greenwich, but it was little more than four months.

Clare inhales, her widening eyes signalling yet another brainwave. ‘I bet that’s why they got married. It validated the policy in some way.’

‘It certainly increases the payout,’ says Kelvin.

‘We have to tell the police about this.’ Clare’s all set to dash to the police station right away and my heart gives a violent kick.

‘It’s definitely a theory worth pursuing,’ I say. ‘Wow. This is a lot to take in.’

‘You’re not on your own,’ Kelvin tells me, by way of a conclusion, and I see that in spite of the talk of my ‘fling’, he assumes we’re still together. He admires Clare for defending her man with such energy and intelligence.

He gets up to depart. I hear them at the door, her reassurances that his name will not be invoked outside these walls, certainly not in any conversations with the police. I hunt in the fridge for another alcohol-free lager and when I return to the living room Clare’s on the sofa with her laptop. ‘What are you doing?’

‘I’m looking up a number for your guy on the St Mary’s Police website, but they don’t seem to list detectives, only PCs.’

‘I think they’re based at Woolwich, it’ll be a much bigger team.’ I move close to her, careful not to make physical contact. ‘Wait, Clare, before you put your name to anything, have you thought how you’ll explain how you got this information? I don’t want you getting in trouble on my account. I’ve already put you through so much, I don’t want your job to be at risk as well.’

She pauses. In a heavily regulated business like estate agency, the slightest hint of financial impropriety can lead to suspension, and colluding with a hacker is more than a hint. ‘You’re right,’ she agrees. ‘Maybe it’s better to send it anonymously. You know, like a tip-off. Let’s see if they have a special email address for that on the Woolwich site. Oh, good, they do.’

I peer over her shoulder, struggling to focus. ‘If it’s just some admin address, they might not see that for days. I’ll ring first thing in the morning and get DC Merchison’s email address. If you forward me Kelvin’s file, I’ll make sure neither of your names are on it before I send it on.’

‘Good plan.’ Her fingers move across the keyboard and my phone pings as the file hits my inbox.

‘Thank you,’ I say. ‘Thank you for everything.’

Whenever I say thank you now, she never says you’re welcome. Usually, she leaves the room, but on this occasion she is not finished. ‘When you speak to him, there was one other thing I remembered. About Kit.’

‘What?’

‘That photo they showed us when we went there for dinner. The one on the mantelpiece that Kit used for the coke.’

I take a swallow of my crap placebo lager. ‘Melia in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof? I remember. What about it?’

‘When we went round on Friday, it wasn’t there.’

‘I didn’t notice. Why’s that relevant?’

‘Just that, if he deliberately disappeared last Monday, if he knew he was never going to be able to come back, he’d have chosen a few sentimental things to take with him.’

‘He must have loads of photos of Melia on his phone,’ I point out, but she dismisses this with an impatient gesture. ‘You heard Kelvin, they’ll both have switched to something untraceable. He can’t go turning his old phone on, he’d be tracked. So he grabs the photo at the last minute, something familiar, something he can hold in his hand. It’s hard to isolate yourself, emotionally, I mean. You need things to connect you, especially in a long game like his.’

I try not to shrug. The missing photo seems an inconsequential detail to me. It could have been moved to the bedroom or one of them could have hurled it at the wall during one of their rows. But I don’t like the way Clare’s building a case. If she’s remembered this detail, she’ll remember others too. She’s a natural investigator.

‘Okay, I’ll mention it,’ I say.

Satisfied, she sets aside her laptop and stacks the glasses and plates, removing them to the kitchen. Freed from her scrutiny, I allow my expression to change from gratitude to horror.

I take out my phone and, instead of downloading the file to send to Merchison in the morning, I compose a text:

How are you bearing up? No need to reply if you don’t want to.

Then I select Melia’s name and hit ‘Send’.

Almost instantly, she replies:

I asked you not to contact me.

I close the thread, lock the screen, and toss the phone onto the nearest armchair, calling to Clare that I’m nipping out to get some cigarettes.

She reappears in the doorway. ‘Don’t think you’re smoking in here!’ she snaps.

‘Of course not,’ I reply, meekly.

Fifteen minutes later, having duly picked up a pack from Sainsbury’s Local, I arrive on the corner of Tiding Street. I wait for a couple at the far end to go into their house and turn on the lights, before I approach the Ropers’ door, head down, and ring the bell.

Melia opens up without revealing more of herself than a swoop of dark hair, fingers curling around the edge of the door. ‘I got your message. Obviously.’

‘I wasn’t sure you’d remember.’ But it’s a stupid thing to say because Melia remembers everything and our emergency code is hardly a minor detail. Messages in plain sight, that’s what we agreed. No extra phones to be discovered, no secret threads.