I nevertheless found it hard to understand how someone who worked merely as a driver for a funeral director could somehow ‘lose’ a corpse and substitute valuable items in the coffin with a view to hiding them efficiently until they could be disposed of, for financial gain, without anyone else in the company knowing anything about it. Patrick and I considered postponing the second phase of our night’s work, wondering if it might prove to be more worthwhile first to interview Mr Littlejohn and his partner. We already had an appointment with them the following morning. (They were, we had learned, personal friends of John and Elspeth, which was unlikely to make it any easier.) But we were on site, so to speak, and, more to the point, my other half was gasping for a pint. We went to a pub near the old docks, which have been extensively redeveloped and improved, the old warehouses now boutiques and restaurants with apartments above. According to Carrick, the Barge hardly ever closed, a state of affairs that was only tolerated by the constabulary because the landlord was a mine of useful information concerning the local riff-raff.
