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time to time.
    ‘Yes, but Bill…’
    ‘Bill being?’
    ‘Bill Lunt. The mad photographer?’
    ‘Oh, yes. Lunt. Chief suspect, according to Henry.’
    Maxwell turned. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I sensed a bit of a niggle there. What is Henry’s problem?’ he asked, exasperated. ‘He’d have his doubts about Padre Pio.’ A bad call perhaps – a lot of people had their doubts about Padre Pio. Except that Jacquie didn’t know who he was.
    ‘He led you straight to the body,’ she reminded him. ‘Apparently the footprints don’t diverge from the path to it by even an inch.’
    ‘Well, he knew where he had taken his picture from,’ Maxwell played photographer’s advocate. ‘So he just followed his eyeline.’
    ‘What was his landmark, then?’ She leant forward, as someone laying the final trump card.
    He leant back on the sofa opposite her, as someone with an ace up his sleeve. ‘The moon, in actual fact,’ he said, smugly. ‘He was taking photographs of the moon for the Leighford Photographer of the Year competition and the murder took place while he was doing it. Coincidentally, I mean. The murderer wasn’t posing for him or anything.’
    ‘Glad to hear it. So we’ve got some slavering werewolf out there, have we? Bad moon rising and all?’
    Maxwell ignored her. ‘So, when we got to the dunes, it was about the same time and so the moon was the same…Do you think Henry will realise that?’
    ‘What, that the moon is the same?’
    ‘Well, he wanted time of death. The moon in the picture will help him there, won’t it? I mean, I expect there’s a website or something, is there? About the moon?’
    Jacquie sat up straight and looked at her man. Then she got up and went across to sit by him. She stroked his hair and gave him a kiss. ‘I learn a bit more about you every day, Peter Maxwell,’ she said, softly. ‘You always chunter when you’re feeling a bit fragile. And, by the way, the latest police think tank says that there is a link between the moon and psychotic behaviour.’
    ‘Several million werewolves can’t be wrong,’ he nodded. ‘It’s like anthropy, only different. And, by the way, my money’s still on Ollie Reed.’
    He smiled at her and leant in to her fondling hand. ‘It was a bit of a shock, you know,’ he conceded. ‘A hand, just by his foot. That meant, just by mine. I was right behind him.’ He sighed. ‘It was young.’
    ‘Ah, sweetie,’ she said, frowning and smoothing his cheek. ‘It wasn’t one of Yours, you know.’
    He looked up at her. ‘I hope not,’ he said. He swirled the Southern Comfort in his glass. ‘It was dirty. Young and dirty.’
    ‘Well, it would be, Max,’ she said, trying to be abit businesslike. ‘It had been buried in the sand.’
    ‘No, not just sandy. Really dirty. Ground-in dirt, broken fingernails. Uncared for and unwashed.’
    ‘What, you mean, someone living rough?’
    ‘That kind of thing, yes.’
    ‘That’s not terribly common in Leighford,’ she said. ‘That’s more of a big city thing. Big town, at least. Brighton. Portsmouth.’
    ‘I haven’t seen any kids like that around, I admit,’ Maxwell said. He saw more from the saddle of his bike than most coppers saw in a month of Sundays from their patrol cars. ‘I usually notice their dogs first, in fact. They’ve always got great big dogs, haven’t they?’ Metternich stirred in his sleep. His antennae had registered a warming of the atmosphere, but even so, when he had had a few more minutes’ shuteye, he thought he might go and sleep outside His Boy’s room. You couldn’t be too careful. Now the subject had turned to d**s, he thought the time was ripe. He got up, stretched extravagantly and sauntered up the stairs. They watched him go and smiled at each other.
    ‘Who’d have thought the old chap would go soft like that?’ Jacquie said. ‘You can set your watch by him these nights.’
    Maxwell, who, from the quiet of the War Office, his night-time attic, often