Relf did not telephone the next morning.
Eleanor woke at Marsh View with her clothes folded over a chair and no recollection of folding them. For a few seconds she thought she had missed her train.
Then she remembered Dover.
Mrs Fenner had left a note outside the room.
Breakfast until ten. After that, toast.
Eleanor washed, dressed and went downstairs at half past nine.
Relf's message arrived while she was eating.
Nothing to report yet. Please stop checking.
She put the telephone face down.
Mercer answered questions for two days without answering the ones Relf wanted.
He acknowledged his signatures. He had arranged journeys, advised clients and authorised payments. Much of the money, he said, had gone towards helping people.
When asked about Michael Vale, he described him as an inquisitive young man.
Relf pointed out that Michael had been fifty-eight when he died.
"I knew him when he was young."
"You knew him in 2024 too."
Mercer looked at the document on the table.
The correspondence recovered from Helen's wallet contained a letter Michael had sent to the company. It asked about the plate in Hong Kong and quoted several of its groups.
Mercer had received a copy.
Three days later, he wrote:
I will speak to him personally. No further correspondence.
"You did speak to him?" Relf asked.
"Yes."
"Where?"
"Canterbury."
"The day he died?"
"Yes."
That answer changed the room.
Mercer's solicitor leaned towards him. They spoke quietly, and the interview paused.
By the end of the week, Relf had enough to visit Martin.
Eleanor went with him.
Martin had put Michael's papers into folders. The boxes were still in the sitting room, but their contents were no longer lying where he had left them after the funeral.
"Tea?" he asked.
"Please," Eleanor said.
He returned with three mugs, forgetting the milk until he had sat down.
"I'll get it," she said.
When she came back, Relf had placed a photograph on the table.
"Mercer's admitted meeting Michael at the church."
Martin looked at it.
"What did he say happened?"
"That they argued."
"About what?"
"The plate. The names Michael thought he'd identified."
Martin rubbed a thumb along the mug handle.
"And the bell?"
"We've reviewed the original photographs with an examiner. Something had been placed where it could interfere with the normal action. The first inquiry didn't recognise its significance."
"Michael wouldn't have left that there."
"No."
Relf let him look at the photograph before continuing.
"Mercer's account is that Michael went up to show him something. He says he stayed below."
"Did he touch the rope?"
"He won't answer that."
Martin looked from Relf to Eleanor.
"Then you still don't know."
"We know Mercer was there. We know he had read Michael's questions. We have evidence of interference with the mechanism. And he left without reporting the fall."
"Like Marris."
"Yes."
"Except Marris called someone."
"Yes."
Martin set down his mug.
"What are you charging him with?"
"Michael's murder."
Relf explained what supported the charge and what they still had to establish. Martin listened without interrupting.
When he had finished, Martin picked up the photograph again.
"I kept wondering whether he'd become careless."
Eleanor sat beside him.
"He'd have hated that," Martin said. "Being remembered as someone who didn't know what he was doing."
She waited.
At last he put the photograph down.
"I'd like to tell the band."
"Of course," Relf said.
"Just what you've told me. Nothing more."
The French inquiry supplied the next part.
Hotel footage showed Mercer entering Margaret Sayer's corridor. He had used a different passport when he booked the room opposite hers.
He left carrying a laptop bag.
The bag was visible again in a photograph taken when he met Helen in London. Helen identified it among items recovered after his arrest.
Margaret's computer was inside.
There were messages between Sayer and Mercer, including the brief call she had made after Claire's visit.
Bull's envelope had frightened her. He had written that he could connect the old instructions to the company records and that Helen was bringing originals to Britain.
Margaret had called Mercer for advice.
"She went to him," Eleanor said when Relf told her.
"Yes."
"Not knowing he was the person Bull was trying to identify."
"Bull knew enough to warn her. He didn't know every name Mercer used."
Margaret had kept a draft message to Helen.
Don't give David anything until we have spoken.
It had never been sent.
Mercer denied giving her medication. He said she had been ill when he visited and that he took the computer at her request.
The French investigators continued their work.
Relf did not call it settled. He did tell Eleanor that they were treating her death as homicide.
Marianne Voss was alive.
The news came on a wet afternoon while Eleanor was packing for the third time.
Relf telephoned and said it before she could ask anything else.
"In Portugal?"
"Yes. The photograph Bull found was her."
"Have you spoken to her?"
"Through colleagues there. She's agreed to give a statement."
"Why did she leave?"
Marianne had found payments in her employer's accounts that she could not reconcile with the work invoiced. When she asked about them, someone emptied her desk while she was at lunch.
Two days later she was warned to stop.
She had gone to Sayer, whose name she knew from the transactions.
Sayer arranged the journey.
The nine thousand pounds paid for it, the documents and somewhere to stay.
"Did Margaret mean to help her?" Eleanor asked.
"It appears so."
"Mercer?"
"He knew she'd gone. She says she was told they could bring her back whenever they wanted."
Marianne had spent six weeks moving between rooms, using a name that was not hers and avoiding the accounts that could have led someone to her.
Now she had protection and a lawyer.
"She wasn't cargo," Eleanor said.
"No."
"Neither were most of them."
"No."
Weller's account of Bull's death held together where it could be checked.
Marris's call was recorded. Weller's movements placed him near the church afterwards. The fibre recovered from the frame was consistent with his coat, and his shoes matched the partial impression near the door.
He had taken a note from Bull's pocket.
It was found among papers removed from his house before his arrest.
HART — Weller? Ask H.L.
He had kept it.
"Why?" Eleanor asked.
Relf shook his head.
"Perhaps he wanted to know how much Bull had connected. Perhaps he meant to destroy it later."
Eleanor's review supported the conclusion that Bull had survived the fall for a short interval. She could not promise that help would have saved him.
She put that in writing.
Weller tried to make use of it.
"So he would have died anyway?"
"That isn't what the report says," Relf told him.
"But she can't say he would have lived."
"No."
Weller sat back.
"You don't know what I found up there."
"You've told us."
"A dying man."
"A living man."
Weller looked towards his solicitor.
Relf waited.
The charges would have to be argued on the evidence. Eleanor could describe the injuries and their likely course. She could not turn uncertainty into the answer either side preferred.
What she could say was that Weller had recognised a need for help, chosen not to summon it and altered the scene before leaving.
Mercer's accounts led to more names.
Some belonged to people who had paid to escape prosecution. Others belonged to people whose reasons were less easily judged. There were facilitators, employees and professionals who had signed one paper without asking about the next.
The seven deaths Hale had listed were examined again.
His account of them was neither wholly false nor wholly reliable. Four inquiries now had evidence that had not been available originally. Others remained uncertain.
Relf refused to describe them as seven solved murders.
There was no single Eight directing every journey for half a century.
There had been an authority passed between people, shared when convenient and claimed by whoever could make the arrangements work. Hart had controlled the British side for years. Mercer had authorised the closure and retained access to the money.
The sally left at the station had been Mercer's warning to Weller.
He admitted that much.
"He would understand it," he said.
"And if we found it?"
"You did."
"You wanted us following the number."
Mercer gave a small shrug.
"People like an explanation."
On Eleanor's last evening at Marsh View, Relf came to return her copy of Bull's letter.
Mrs Fenner brought tea without asking.
Eleanor read the final line again.
Michael deserved a better answer than the one we gave Martin.
"Did you know Bull had named you as the exception?" she asked.
"No."
"Why do you think he did?"
Relf watched Mrs Fenner close the door.
"He'd read the old Wycliffe file. Hatherley said he thought I'd kept looking longer than anyone else."
"You did."
"And got nowhere."
"Until now."
Relf drank his tea.
"Will Mercer tell you more?"
"Some. Not everything."
"Ben Hale?"
"David Mercer?"
"Whatever name he started with."
"We're still checking."
Eleanor folded the letter.
At least she knew which names mattered to the dead.
Michael Vale. Margaret Sayer. Adrian Bull.
She put the copy in her bag beside Martin's transcription.
"What happens to Marris?" she asked.
"The murder charge won't proceed. His conduct afterwards is still being dealt with."
"Does Martin know?"
"Yes."
"Will he speak to him?"
"I don't know."
Relf stood.
"Your train tomorrow?"
"Ten fourteen."
"I'll take you."
"You don't have to."
"I know."
She left the suitcase closed.