“I do wish,” he said, “that Surrey CID would keep their messes to themselves.” “Yes, sir,” said Gibbons. They had been working on the case for a week and had turned up nothing. So far as they could determine, Annette’s account of her trips to London agreed exactly with what her credit cards said; there was no large block of time unaccounted for. There were no suspicious calls on her phone records. They had spoken with her friends from before her marriage to Berowne, but none of them had known anything to her discredit. They had gone over the Surrey CID reports minutely, and had spent wearisome hours compiling timetables. But every line of inquiry had simply petered out on them. Carmichael looked again at the report Gibbons had just handed him. “It looks like you talked to most of the first-class passengers on that cruise,” he said. “Yes, sir,” said Gibbons. There was no hint in his voice of how extremely tedious he had found the task. “I interviewed the crew as well.
