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detective. You wound up suspecting everybody and everything.
     
    The rain had died away overnight, but Guy knew the Lakes well enough to wrap up warm and prepare for the worst. A fortnight before their final row, Megan had paid to kit him out in the wet-weather gear that walking in Snowdonia demanded. He’d said he would reimburse her when the big futures deal came through, but obviously her behaviour rendered the promise null and void. It served her right that there was no big futures deal. When he said he planned a walk, Sarah filled a flask and insisted on lending him her mobile phone and a torch.
    Outside, the wind’s edge scraped his cheeks like a blade. At the head of the lake, he sat on a bench and read a couple of chapters from a dog-eared David Copperfield that he’d picked up from a charity shop. Small children squealed while their anorak-clad mothers prattled about soap operas and celebrity scandals.
    This time last year, he’d still been in Rome, squashed into a one-bedroom apartment with Farfalla and her one-year-old, Bianca. He’d met her the day Maryell, the wealthy American widow whose suite at the BoscoloPalace he’d shared, discovered that he wasn’t a celebrated English artist after all. He’d told Farfalla that he was a spy working for the British government. At the time he was reading The Woman in White and he amused himself by telling her that it was his sourcebook for deciphering top secret codes. Trouble was, he discovered that he wasn’t the only one leading a double life. Farfalla meant ‘butterfly’ and she lived up to her name. All the time she was supposedly waitressing on the Via Cavour, she was sleeping with a minicab driver who made a fortune fleecing tourists new to the city. Guy knew it couldn’t last. Language was a barrier, and then there was the child. Farfalla decided to move in with her fancy man, and forty-eight hours later Guy was chatting up Megan by the check-in desk at Fiumicino airport. She’d walked out on her job as a nanny when the kids’ father wanted her to perform services never mentioned in the contract she’d signed with the agency.
    Guy stuffed the book into his pocket and contemplated the inky water. Those cold depths had been the resting place of Donald Campbell, who sacrificed his life in quest of speed, his boat somersaulting as he strained to reach 300 miles per hour. Guy remembered seeing black and white footage of Campbell before the accident. A suave, Brylcreemed Englishman, cigarette in hand. A charmer, a ladies’ man, the sort of chap Guy might have become, had he been a couple of generations older. After thirty-odd years, the wreck of Bluebird was found and lifted from the bottom of the lake, tail fin intact, still proudly bearingthe Union Jack. Campbell’s remains were recovered at last. It was right and proper that the dead should receive a decent burial.
    Emma Bestwick would be forty now, older than the gossiping women. He wouldn’t speculate on what course her life might have taken. What was done was done. But he ought to pay his respects.
    The wind had dropped as he ambled into the village, past the deserted bowling green and tennis courts, glancing in windows of shops that sold fishing tackle and Kendal mint cake, hiking boots and waterproof gear. When he glanced over the roofs towards the bracken-covered slopes, his stomach lurched. The road bent at the bridge and he stopped to take a deep breath and listen to the rush and gurgle of the beck. Across the road the bell tower of the church of St Andrew loomed above a small burial ground dotted with clusters of snowdrops. A sign pointed to the tall carved cross that marked John Ruskin’s grave. Ruskin had opted to be buried here, in preference to Westminster Abbey. What a waste. Guy couldn’t understand why Ruskin hadn’t wanted to finish up in splendour. One day he’d have his own fifteen minutes of fame, and he’d make the most of them.
    He consulted his watch. A 14 carat Rolex Oyster