SEVENTY-TWO

Elias turned off his radio as he headed north for Lincoln, too drained for anything but silence. The blurred headlights of oncoming cars in the drizzle threatened to bring on a headache. He drove largely on autopilot, brooding on the revelation that Dunstan Warne’s fingerprints had been found on the silver pennies – or, more exactly, on the implication that he’d been planting them at the time of his murder, rather than Gregory Scott having been digging them up, hard though that was to reconcile with that man’s confession. He’d have to tell Anna, of course, tarnishing her memories of her uncle and diminishing the value of the farm. Yet what got to him most was the silver pennies themselves, and where they’d come from.

He pulled off the road into a lay-by, ran a search on his phone. A handful from the 1206 coinage were available from dealers and on eBay, but all were from Canterbury or London, with not a trace of anything from Lynn or indeed from any of the other regional mints. Buying over forty of them would have been nigh on impossible, even had Warne had tens of thousands of pounds to spare. And there’d been no trace at the farm of the equipment he’d have needed to strike those coins himself. Anyway, such a forgery would surely have been discovered on their first proper examination, as Dunstan Warne must have known. Besides, there was a far simpler explanation. The man had been obsessed with John’s lost baggage train, particularly since Merchant had first made contact. Was it really so implausible that he’d worked out where it had ended up, that he’d found a part of it and brought it home to bury? If so, then surely that was where he’d been last Sunday.

‘My god!’ said Maria Quinn excitedly, when he called her. ‘People here are saying the maddest stuff. They’re saying that you and Anna Warne were up on that plane. They’re saying that Wharton’s under arrest.’

‘All true,’ he told her. ‘And plenty else besides. I’ll tell you everything when we have a moment. But right now I need to know if you’ve had any joy with those drone photos.’

‘Sorry, no. I got called away on that Priya Kapur business.’

‘What Priya Kapur business?’

‘You didn’t get my message?’

‘Honestly, I’ve got about two thousand of the damned things. It’ll take me a week to go through them. Why? What’s happened?’

‘Okay. Well, you remember Priya Kapur, yes? The receptionist from the King John Hotel.’

‘Bloody hell, Quinn. It was only yesterday afternoon. I’m not that old yet, am I?’

Quinn laughed. ‘Sorry. Okay. Well, she came in to the station a bit earlier to make a statement. She brought her own lawyer and everything.’

‘And? What did she have to say?’

‘Only that Gregory Scott didn’t murder Dunstan Warne. Only that he couldn’t possibly have done. Because he spent the whole of that Sunday night in bed with her.’