Relf telephoned the following afternoon.
"Peter Wycliffe."
Eleanor was in the lounge at Marsh View House with the Ordnance Survey map open on her knees. She had been tracing the line of the old channel from Wren's Cut towards the sea.
"Say that again."
"Peter Wycliffe. That's the name he's using."
"Which one?"
"The genuine passport."
She put down her pencil.
"Who is he?"
"Someone I've been looking for since 1998."
She met Relf in Rye.
He had brought a photograph and a newspaper cutting. The photograph was recent, taken at an airport. The man was in his seventies, grey-haired, carrying a coat over one arm.
"Wycliffe ran an investment business," Relf said. "Offices that impressed people, clients who recommended him to their friends. A lot of pensioners. Small investors."
"And he took their money?"
"A great deal of it disappeared. In today's money, we'd be talking millions."
"Was he prosecuted?"
"He vanished before we could charge him."
Eleanor looked at the photograph again.
"Did you find any trace?"
"Enough to keep us looking. No body. Most of the money was never recovered."
"You worked on it?"
"I was a detective sergeant."
"How long?"
"Eleven months."
Relf picked up his knife, then put it down again.
"Eventually we thought he was dead."
"Suicide?"
"Possibly. There were people with reasons to kill him."
"People who'd lost money?"
"Among others."
He pushed the cutting nearer.
"Look at him."
The photograph was coarse with newspaper dots. Dark hair, heavy eyebrows, a cleft in the chin. The raised hand hid part of his face.
Eleanor bent over it.
Then she looked at Relf.
"The man from the boat?"
"That's who I think we've got."
She studied the photograph again, trying to recall the passenger standing beside the water. She had seen him at a distance, in torchlight, with his hands raised. The chin looked familiar now, but she had just been told to look for it.
"How old would Wycliffe be?"
"Seventy-three."
"Have you confirmed it?"
"Not yet."
"But you recognised him last night."
"I thought I did."
Relf drew the cutting back towards him.
"I spent eleven months looking at photographs of that man. His face was in the file, on the office wall, in every appeal we put out."
He smoothed a crease with his thumb.
"I kept wondering what we'd missed."
Eleanor waited, but he said no more.
If Relf was right, the man they had watched changing coats beside a drainage channel had been missing for twenty-eight years. He had arrived with four names to choose from, while his own remained in an old police file.
She looked at the cutting.
"Has he said anything about Bull?"
"Nothing useful."
"Does he know you?"
"I haven't asked him."
"Will you?"
Relf reached for his fork.
"There are some things we need to establish first."
Eleanor let him eat. In the hall, Mrs Fenner was speaking to someone on the telephone about a delivery. A door closed upstairs.
She had expected last night to explain the message. Instead it had brought Relf back to a case he had been unable to finish.
"What if he's been here before?" she asked.
"Wycliffe?"
"Since he disappeared."
Relf looked up.
"We don't know where he's been."
"We know where the boat came from. That doesn't tell us how long he was there."
"No."
She touched the edge of the cutting.
"We've been treating last night as his arrival in Britain. Perhaps he was coming back."
Relf lowered his fork to the plate.