‘Yes, please,’ says Mike, and Joyce pours him another glass.
‘You reading the news later, Mikey boy?’ asks Ron.
‘You’ll have to do better than three glasses of wine to stop Mike presenting the news,’ says Pauline. ‘Do your trick, Mike.’
Mike sits up, ramrod straight, and looks Ron in the eye. ‘Meanwhile, military manoeuvres are continuing in Bosnia and Herzegovina, as the Serbian secessionist spokesperson initiated interventions with interested intermediaries.’
Ron raises his glass. ‘The lad can take a drink.’
‘Thank you, Ronald,’ says Mike.
‘I’ve trained him well,’ says Pauline.
‘Well, aren’t we all terrific,’ says Elizabeth. ‘But, if we could get on. Let’s go through exactly what we know.’
The Jigsaw Room has recently been repainted. Or one wall of it at least. They call it a ‘signature wall’， and it is duck-egg blue. It was Joyce’s idea: she had seen somebody do it on television, and had then raised it with the Amenities Committee. There had been objections, both in terms of cost and aesthetic, but Elizabeth could have told them to save their breath. If Joyce wants a signature wall, Joyce will have a signature wall.
The wall, which does actually look rather good, is currently covered in photographs and documents. There are pictures of Bethany Waites, and the wreck of a car at the foot of Shakespeare Cliff. There are grainy CCTV shots. The photos are surrounded by financial documents, and by timelines meticulously constructed, printed out and laminated by Ibrahim. They used to lay this sort of thing out on the jigsaw table itself, but Joyce has recently come across some sticky hooks you can peel on and off the wall without leaving any marks. Elizabeth much prefers it this way. It reminds her of a Serious Incident Room, the type of place where she has spent many happy hours.
‘For reasons known only to herself,’ says Elizabeth, ‘or to her killer, Bethany decides to leave her flat. CCTV in the lobby of her building captures her at ten fifteen p.m., and, minutes later, we see her car pass by the front of the building.’
‘The car then seems to disappear,’ says Ibrahim. ‘It goes missing for several hours, until it is finally captured again at two forty-seven a.m., approximately a mile from Shakespeare Cliff.’
‘Meaning it has taken her more than four hours to complete a forty-five-minute car journey,’ says Elizabeth.
‘Telling us,’ says Ibrahim, ‘that she must have stopped somewhere on the way. To meet someone, to do something, perhaps to die. And when the CCTV picks up the car again near the cliff, there appear to be two figures in it, not one.’
‘Very blurry though,’ says Pauline. ‘To be fair.’
‘The next morning,’ says Elizabeth, while registering Pauline’s intervention, ‘Bethany’s car is found at the bottom of the cliff. Her body is no longer in it, which is not altogether unsurprising. I once had to push a Jeep with a corpse sitting in the front seat into a quarry, and it popped out almost immediately.’
‘Why did you have to push a –’ says Mike.
‘No time, Mr Waghorn, sorry,’ says Elizabeth. ‘The Conversational French class will scream blue murder if we’re out of this room as much as a minute late. Traces of Bethany Waites’s blood, and fragments of the clothing she was last seen wearing, were found in the wreckage of the car. A houndstooth jacket, and yellow trousers.’
‘Well, that’s another thing,’ says Pauline. ‘Who wears a houndstooth jacket with yellow trousers?’
Elizabeth glances at Pauline. Two interventions now.
‘Her body has never been found,’ says Ibrahim. ‘Usually it would wash up at some point, but not always. Her bank cards and bank accounts have never been used since, nor was there significant activity in her accounts before this incident. She wasn’t squirrelling money away for a disappearance.’