The windscreen wiper squeaked against dry glass and Kincaid realized that the rain had stopped. Freshly plowed fields rose on either side of the narrow road. The bare, chalky soil was a pale brown, and against it the black dots of foraging rooks looked like pepper on toast. Away to the west a cap of beech trees crowned a hill. “How’d you identify him?”

“Wallet in the poor sod’s back pocket. Connor Swann, aged thirty-five, brown hair, blue eyes, height about six feet, weight around twelve stone. Lived in Henley, just a few miles upstream.”

“Sounds like your lads could have handled it easily enough,” said Kincaid, not bothering to conceal his annoyance. He considered the prospect of spending his Friday evening tramping around the Chiltern Hundreds, damp as a Guy Fawkes bonfire, instead of meeting Gemma for an after-work pint at the pub down Wilfred Street. “Bloke has a few drinks, goes for a stroll on the sluicegate, falls in. Bingo.”

Makepeace was already shaking his head. “Ah, but that’s not the whole story, Mr. Kincaid. Someone left a very nice set of prints on either side of his throat.” He lifted both hands from the wheel for an instant in an eloquently graphic gesture. “It looks like he was strangled, Mr. Kincaid.”

Kincaid shrugged. “A reasonable assumption, I would think. But I don’t quite see why that merits Scotland Yard’s intervention.”

“It’s not the how, Mr. Kincaid, but the who. It seems that the late Mr. Swann was the son-in-law of Sir Gerald Asherton, the conductor, and Dame Caroline Stowe, who I believe is a singer of some repute.” Seeing Kincaid’s blank expression, he continued, “Are you not an opera buff, Mr. Kincaid?”

“Are you?” Kincaid asked before he could clamp down his involuntary surprise, knowing he shouldn’t have judged the man’s cultural taste by his physical characteristics.