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private boarding school, and had been in the same year as the dead man.
    Dorothea Bignall, who told them she was thirty-eight to her husband’s fifty-five, was slender, and had a demeanour of such pale fragility it suggested her husband’s claim that she was ill might well be true. Though this might, of course, be down to the fact that she didn’t carry her drink as well as her much larger husband.
    Shortly after it became clear that Mrs Bignall was too tired to string a sentence together, never mind blurt out anything further that was interesting or revealing as to who might have killed the evening’s honoured guest, they allowed her and her husband to go home. Both would, of course, be questioned again when a few more facts had emerged.
    Next, Rafferty said he wanted to question the mayor, Idris Khan. The half-Welsh, half-Asian Khan seemed to have inherited the volubility of both his Celtic and Asian forebears. And although he had calmed down considerably from his earlier over-emotional state, he was clearly still highly charged.
    Khan was a well-known local entrepreneur and fixer who, like Bignall, often featured in the local paper in the course of his duties. A skilled networker, he was said to know everyone who was anyone, which explained why he was the only one amongst the guests who had claimed to recognise Superintendent Bradley during his brief appearance at the evening’s reception. He was more than happy to confirm this fact, which he had already confided to Mary Carmody.
    This lack of recognition of Bradley by the rest of the guests was surprising in itself, given the super’s fondness for getting his face on the telly and in the papers. But perhaps it was that Khan, like Llewellyn, was a teetotaller and, apart from Seward’s soberly on-duty employees, was the only one amongst the official guests who had been both clear-headed and sufficiently astute to realise there might be mileage in mentioning Bradley’s presence that evening.
    Idris Khan and Mandy, his wife, had been amongst the early departing guests. Khan, as they had learned from the security guards posted at the entrance door to Seward’s suite, had returned late in the evening, still trailing his wife, to retrieve something she had left behind.
    Rafferty couldn’t help but wonder if this ‘something’ that had been so urgently required by Mandy Khan had been the dainty tin containing cocaine that Constable Hanks had found in the suite’s main bathroom. However, he decided to reserve this information for another time. He also resisted mentioning that he knew of their late return to the reception shortly before Seward’s body was discovered. It was interesting that neither of the Khans mentioned the latter; maybe it would prove a useful bargaining tool further down the line.
    Uptight and apparently in need of another little sniff of ‘something’, Mandy Khan seemed incapable of answering their questions with any degree of coherence. In fact, she seemed so spaced out and ‘out of it’ that Rafferty quickly concluded he was wasting his time and there was no point in speaking to her further at the moment.
    Marcus Canthorpe, they had, of course, already spoken to. When formally interviewed along with the rest and asked about the late arriving visitor that was Mickey, he told them that he hadn’t seen the man himself and had only learned about him from Ivor Bignall in the furore that had ensued after he had discovered his boss’s murdered body.
    It was Bignall, along with the two security guards, who had revealed the presence of this late visitor. All three would shortly contribute to the photo fit description that would, in spite of Rafferty’s intended delaying tactics, soon be winging its way to the media.
    Questioned about the thankfully still-unidentified Mickey’s late night visit, Canthorpe became defensive, as if he felt his boss’s murder was somehow his fault.
    Fretfully, he told them, ‘According to the security guards, this