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contacts could be made through knowing the right people. They had come from different points on the social scale, though her position owed itself to her father’s ability rather than his birth. He too had been a man who had made his own success, working his way diligently from counter clerk to manager of the local bank, becoming prominent in local politics and finally, for a short time before he died, at Westminster. He had always respected money and this, Culver suspected, was why there had never been any opposition to the marriage of his daughter with a man who was still, basically, a scrap metal dealer – though already, when he met Evelyn, he had been into his first half million, and the rest hadn’t been long in following.
    And yet, it had never been money itself that had motivated him, rather the simple need to achieve success at whatever he attempted.
    If there had ever been any other passion in John Culver’s life, it had been for Georgina. On her he had lavished all the love of which he was capable, though rarely showing it. Motherless, she had turned to him and they had been constant companions throughout her childhood and early adolescence. When, shortly after her return from college, she announced she was going to marry Rupert Fleming, he had been at first incredulous, then furious.
    Fleming had been everything John Culver was opposed to. He had had a privileged education and thrown it away. He had had several attempts at a career and been successful at none of them. He was that unforgivable thing in John Culver’s book, a dilettante, though this was not the term Culver used. His judgement was couched in much earthier terms. But Georgina, who had inherited a will as implacably averse to opposition as his own, refused to give up Fleming. Her father had spent several fruitless months while his anger mounted, trying to make her see sense, then washed his hands of the pair of them. If thine eye offends thee, pluck it out, had always been a maxim he’d lived by.
    He was dimly aware that he’d done more damage to himself than to either Georgina or Fleming by this act, but he was not a man to go back on his decisions, once made. From a distance he watched her progress in the world of business with pride, grimly sticking out the loneliness, and sometimes despair, knowing that as her father’s daughter she wasn’t a complete fool, convinced that one day she must see the man she’d married in his true colours and come back to him.
    It had taken Rupert Fleming’s death for that to happen. John Culver would not have thought that too high a price for the return of his daughter.

SIX
    â€œThink what a torment ’tis to marry one
    Whose heart is leap’d into another’s bosom. ”
    THE POST-MORTEM RESULTS, when they came in, were straightforward enough, but for one thing.
    In the report Rupert Fleming was described as a well-nourished white male, about thirty-five years of age. There were no congenital deformities, tattoo marks, old scars, or other marks of violence on the body, other than those to the head. Internal examination showed that he was in good health, that he had not eaten for some hours before he died. Death was due to cerebral lacerations caused by being shot in the head with a twelve-bore shotgun and, in the opinion of the pathologist, the wound could not have been self-inflicted. He had been dead for approximately eighteen hours when found.
    The ballistics report wasn’t yet available, giving an estimation of the exact distance and angles of the exit and entry wounds, nor the forensic report on the car which would amongst other things reveal the extent of any damage to it, but Timpson-Ludgate’s opinion was good enough for Mayo to be going on with.
    The one thing which was unexpected about the report was the presence in the body of traces of barbiturates and a considerable quantity of alcohol.
    â€œThe alcohol’s understandable enough,”