It had taken him three months to prepare himself fully to impersonate Peter Thomas Wightman, a 42-year-old newly elevated senior partner in the legal firm of Jackson, Pendlebury, Richardson and Wright in Chancery Lane, in the Holborn district of London. He’d learned the man’s name and that of the firm within which he’d been promoted from the legal notices of the Daily Telegraph and further researched it from the publicly available Bar directory issued by the General Council of the Bar and Waterlow’s Solicitors and Barristers Directory, in which the names of all solicitors and barristers in England are listed. Who’s Who gave Jordan the prep school – Downside – and Balliol College, Oxford, at which Wightman had read law. From the main office of the Company House register at Crown Way, Maindy, Cardiff, he legally obtained details of the after tax profit of Jackson, Pendlebury, Richardson and Wright and the individual income and dividends to all its partners, including Wightman.

Jordan discovered Wightman’s age – but far more importantly for his eventual purposes the maiden name of the man’s mother – by paying a series of ten-pound search fees for details of births, deaths and marriages from the Family Records Centre, ECl, London. The maiden name of Wightman’s mother had been Norma Snook. On the marriage certificate to John Wightman, an accountant, she was described as a solicitor. Peter Wightman had married Jean Maidment eighteen years earlier, at St Thomas’s Church, Maidstone. There were three children, and from the voters’ register records at the British Library he’d found the family lived in Kitchener Road, Richmond, Middlesex, and by memorizing the number plate as he drove past the detached property – and then checking at the national car registration office in Gwent, Wales, purporting to have been involved in a slight traffic accident with someone who had not stopped – confirmed that Wightman’s car was a dark green, two-year-old Jaguar.