Maddy, Malcolm and DI Titney all looked at Jonathan as if he was as crazy as a guy who plays Russian Roulette without taking any bullets out of the revolver first.

"If you add the clue of this spot of paint I got on my Duffel yesterday," JC held his coats corner up for inspection, "and then consider this picture…" He clutched the framed photograph of Malcolm and his brother to his chest. "Then your most recent letter starts to look more than a little significant. It is, in fact, the key to this whole sorry affair".

Malcolm was bemused. "What on Earth does any of this mean? What am I looking for in there?"

Jonathan pointed at the house, or more particularly the railings that separated the pit in front of the basement from the rest of the world.

"Perhaps you'd like to start at the beginning? It might give us mere mortals a chance to catch up", said the DI without humour. He pulled out a kitchen chair and sat. The others followed suit. If they were going to be amazed, they wanted to have it happen in comfort.

Creek began slowly to twitch aside the lace-curtains of the mystery. "When Maddy and I first came here, we both assumed we were investigating another locked-room, well, locked-building mystery. Or, because of your call to Catherine, Malcolm, some kind of weird time-shift riddle. We were quite wrong, but for a very good reason. I'll admit I struggled with this one. I overlooked some important features and went off on a few tangents".

"Chased a few Red Herrings?" interjected Maddy, still cross about the previous night. That morning she'd even put on her spare pair of horrendous earrings just to spite him. They were the long dangley ones she knew he hated, because they appeared to be the kind of adornment even Pat Evens (née Butcher) off of Eastenders would reject as tacky.

Jonathan grinned. "Yes, exactly. If I'd just remembered the fascinating thing about railings earlier, I could have been back home by now, devising a way to film a live squid being produced from a top hat".

Malcolm looked beseechingly to the policeman. "Does this make any sense to you?"

DI Titney gave a sorry shake of his head. "I hear Mr. Creek has a special way of rationalising and explaining apparently impossible murders. If it turns out he's just as crazy as he sounds, you cause a distraction and I'll overpower him".

JC struggled on in the face of cynicism. "It all started to come into focus with that shoe. The 'tarty' black stiletto you found in the garden. Not only was it the wrong size to be the real Mrs. Berries, it was also unmarked, which was very much a part of this puzzle. It looked as if it was brand-new, except for the brown foot mark inside it which proved it had been regularly warn."

Maddy made another contribution. "So you're saying it had been planted in the garden for some reason? To make it look like she'd been wearing those shoes when she fell onto the fence when in-fact she'd been what? Bare-footed?"

"Carefully placed, yes. Though I'm quite sure she'd been wearing them when she fell. I'm one hundred percent sure she did fall now, Maddy. The whole idea about the hammer and her being carefully knocked into place was a dead-end, pardon the pun."

Maddy gave a smile of sudden realisation. "The only kind of shoes that get worn but don't get worn are ones that never see a surface harsher than a carpet! Oh that's clever! That's how you knew she was a working girl, Jonathan. She'd dress-up for her client when she got to his place."

"You're right. That's exactly what I suspect". He turned back to the two men. "This is a bit kinky, but the only shoes not to get scuffed on the heel and sole, no tedious jokes please Maddy, are only warn indoors. Bedroom shoes, if you like."

"Or shoes worn by someone in a wheelchair", suggested Malcolm. Jonathan chose to ignore him.

"Can we talk about the Mork and Mindy thing?" asked the Inspector. "Without your invaluable help, we in the force had already ascertained she'd not been walking in the shoes on a hard surface. Given the gravely nature of the access to this lighthouse, she'd not walked into this building with them on. Which begs the question", he looked at Malcolm pointedly, "what happened to the shoes she had been wearing to come here?"

Before Malcolm could launch into a long defence, Jonathan continued by pulling a folded sheet of paper from his pocket. "This is a letter sent to you six months ago, Malcolm. One from the so-called 'The Brotherhood of the Living Saviour'. I was a bit suspicious of its origins at first, but the US postmarks all tie up and the content seems like the usual work of a religious fanatic. Except for one long four-letter word I spotted. Have you ever seen Mork and Mindy? It's the American TV show that launched Robin Williams's career in the seventies?"

"I think we're all well aware of the series", said the mistaken copper. "Nanu, nanu, Orson and drinking with fingers."

"Yes, that's the one. It's a show for a youngish audience and so gets scheduled around teatime, well before the watershed. It's precisely because it gets shown that early that one of the episodes never gets aired in this county, although I suppose American kids get to see it all the time. Just like that thing with the reversed dates, it just goes to show how our culture and theirs differ-"

Malcolm, equipped with a slight hearing impairment, interrupted. "This is all well and good, but what startling insights does Mark and Cindy give you into that letter?"

"I'll come to the point. If it were an episode of 'Friends', the missing show would be called 'The one with Mr Wanker in it'. The word hasn't got a meaning in America, but because as I recall he gets quite a few mentions, it's obviously not suitable for 6 o'clock viewing in this country. I understand it has a cult following though. People rent the video and chant along".

The DI pulled the letter across the table. There near the bottom was the very un-American rude word that Jonathan was talking about. The policeman was as fast as Maddy to realise what it meant, but before he could say anything Maddy launched herself into the fray.

"You're saying is that the writer wasn't an American Religious Zealot at all-"

"Ah! The ancient Jewish sect which attempted to install a world Jewish Theocracy before circa AD 70," said Malcolm, desperately trying to re-enter the conversation. He failed.

"-but someone just pretending to be? Why?" finished Maddy.

"I'll tell you in a moment", said a very annoying Jonathan. "We should discuss this spot of black paint on my coat first."

"Obviously you must have brushed against something wet", assured the Inspector. "Ha! I know what you're thinking, but Malcolms' fence was quite dry. The other officers and I had our hands all over it yesterday when we were trying to lift Miss Amberghast off".

"I'm sure you did", said Jonathan, looking at the policeman. "And it's a meaningful feature of this that you failed to release her. But look how low down the wet paint must have been to touch my coat here. What's that? Just over knee height? Did you feel around down quite that close to the ground?"

The policeman wasn't very happy with Creeks assessment of his investigation. "So far, Mister Creek, all I've heard from you is a selection of best-guesses and maybes. Sadly we in the police force are required to work with provable facts. In reality that blob of paint could have come from a dozen different places, so I'll speak frankly. In what possible way would the perpetrator of this crime gain an advantage by painting the bottom twelve inches of those railings? I'm not saying it is nonsense. All I'm saying is that it sounds like it is."

With her shrewd idea of Jonathan's mental processes, Maddy was well ahead of the detective now, and still accelerating to catch JC. "But I suppose you're not saying it was all of the railings which were wet, are you Jonathan?"

"No. Just a tiny part of them, which you were virtually spot-on about when you joked about the murder being committed with the use of a spanner. It's funny how coincidence manifests."

"I prefer to think that my unconscious mind had already worked out how it had been done." said Maddy, realising what it was about railings that made them very special scenes of crime. She turned to Malcolm. "When you looked out of your front door on Saturday night, just before going to bed, the fence you could see was your own."

"Of course", said Berrie, his forehead knitted, Klingon-like, in confusion. "But when you woke up on Sunday morning and walked outside to discover what you thought was Kate impaled on your fence, it wasn't your fence any more."

There was an uncomfortable pause. "Are you insane?" exclaimed Malcolm. "I'm not in the habit of selling my fence in the middle of the night! I didn't open my door at two in the morning to a nomadic scrap-metal dealer who persuaded me to part with my-"

"That's not exactly what I meant", butted in Maddy. "It wasn't your fence for the same reason that you didn't call a 'railing-repair-man' out to fix the damage this morning. You don't repair wrought iron railings. You replace them."

"Of course I replace them! We're eighty feet from the sea! The salt spray in the air starts to rust iron in months. I had to have a local firm replace most of the sections a couple of years ago."

"A local firm?" asked the DI, suddenly catching up.

JC continued on Malcolms' behalf. "Naturally a local firm. You can't buy two tons of cast iron railings by mail order, can you? I'm sure a man with a lorry turned up, switched them and carted the old rusty ones away to a scrap-yard. It's not a massively hard job because they're designed to just unbolt. All you need is a few minutes per section and a spanner."

Maddy looked at Jonathan with a smile playing across her lips. "Aha! Once you've unbolted a length and replaced it, you need to repaint the nuts and bolts to seal the elements out. Otherwise they'd quickly rust and you'd never be able to remove that section again without a lot of hard work."

JC smiled happily back. "Yes, or you could paint them to hide the fact they'd been recently undone. It must have been a freshly painted nut-head that my coat touched yesterday morning when I was looking at the body. You see, what we have with railings is a portable scene of the crime! Do you find all the pieces are falling into place?"

The DI stood up stiffly and went to make himself a glass of water. "Ok, ok… Lets imagine for a moment that you've convinced me Ms. Amberghast was killed elsewhere by falling onto railings and was then what? Trucked in? On the off-chance an identical fence was at the end of the mile-and-a-half long track which runs here? I don't think so".

Maddy had blown aside the fog of confusion in her own mind now. She counted Jonathan's clues off on her fingers. "You've covered the mysterious unwarn-warn shoe, The masturbatory Mork and Mindy link, the rapidly repaired railings and the stubborn spot of paint. But you've not explained why Jenny had dyed her hair or told us how we're ever going to find out where or why she died, or who else was involved. It all links back to whoever sent those fake loony sect letters from America, doesn't it?"

Jonathan became more serious and continued sadly. "I'm sorry, Malcolm, but I'm afraid the things I've seen and heard all point to just one person. Someone close to you. Imagine a situation where someone you love is married to someone else. I know it's the stuff of tragic 'straight-to-video' movies but it happens and when it does it usually ends in tears. A thing like that can take a perfectly normal person and turn them, well, inside out. Maybe you'd seek-out a substitute, to use a very similar sounding word. Perhaps she's a little too short and a little too dark, so you buy her high-heeled shoes and ask her, pay her, to dye her hair. Before long you have the next best thing to the object of your desires…. But it's not enough to stop the pain, just to ease it. The desire to posses the real focus of your love makes you want to destroy her marriage, split her apart from her partner, and manoeuvre yourself into her life. Here some inside knowledge is required. Maybe years before it had come up in conversation that she was afraid of something that could be used against her husband and their relationship? Frequent trips abroad made it easy to send letters in the right tone from the right part of the world. The plan begins to work, and she and her husband part. I've got to guess at some of the details of the next bit but I think it all makes sense. Late one night our Mr. X got into a fight with Jenny. The fact she'd stopped dying her hair suggests she was planing to return to her natural shade, and that could only mean she intended to dissolve the business partnership. Perhaps the disagreement was over that, but it's not really important what the argument was about. It's only important because it lead to Jenny falling, slipping or being pushed out of a window. A window directly above an iron fence identical to your own, Malcolm." Jonathan pushed the picture of Malcolms' brother and the house towards Berrie and pointed at the railings. "An iron fence just like that one."

Malcolm hit the table in anger and disbelief. "That's outrageous, Creek! My brother is fond of Kate, but no more than that. You can't just accuse him of murder because he happens to travel abroad a lot and shares the same model fence as me. It's ridiculous! There must be hundreds of homes around here that have the same style and size of fence from the same local company!" He snarled at the group. "You've made a terrible, hurtful mistake this time!"

Maddy continued for Jonathan. "Maybe, but there are a few other factors to consider. Whoever brought Jenny here stuck on top of a section of fence, must have been here before, known yours was the same size and design and had access to a large vehicle. Something like a removals van. I see it like this; imagine his shock and horror at what's happened, looking down from the open window. In a moment like that the mind either goes into shell-shocked neutral or into adrenaline overdrive. Your brother had a few moments to think, because the body was screened from the rest of the houses in the road by his business's lorry parked outside his house. It was the middle of the night, at the end of a cul-de-sac, so who was there to see him struggling to get her body off of those spikes? We know if five policemen couldn't extricate her, what chance did he have? Suddenly, out of the soup of his fear and building panic, a crouton of hope bobbed to the surface."

"Do you have to reduce everything to the level of food?" asked Jonathan.

"Don't interrupt", snapped Maddy. "It occurred to him that there was a way he could turn this tragedy to his advantage. Every cloud has a silver lining, as my old mum used to say. He realised the only way to get rid of the body was to unbolt the whole section of fence, load it into the back of his lorry and… then what? Dump it somewhere? How obvious is that going to be with a gapping hole outside his house? He might as well put up a big neon sign that reads: 'Prostitute Killer Here'. Ask yourself, what alternatives are there to swapping it with someone else's section? And who's better than the very man he wanted to part from his wife in the first place? So he quickly gathered up a few items, like the paint, some gloves or tissues to avoid fingerprints and her shoe which had fallen off. Then it was a quick, if heavy job to unbolt the section of fence and load it into the van. He'd drive straight here and kill the headlights long before he reached the lighthouse so that nothing untoward would appear on the security camera videotape. With this places thick walls and tiny windows you'd never hear anything, even a big vehicle pulling up outside and someone struggling with a fence and the body stuck on top of it. Then he'd head home with your section of fence to fill his own gap. We can't be entirely sure of his motives, but it was never going to look good to Mrs. Berrie when a dead prostitute who looked just like her was found outside her estranged husbands home, was it? Perhaps he hoped Kate would freak-out at the implications and would divorce you in the blink of an eye. You can see it on the forms, can't you? Reason for unreconcilable breakdown of the marriage? Paid woman to look just like me, and killed her".

Malcolm lunged out across the table. He grasped the telephone and dragged across the kitchen table towards himself. "There's an easy way to solve this. If my brother is still in Canada he has to be innocent and I'll get his answer-phone". He stabbed the numbers rigorously into the keypad and clasped the handset to his ear. There was the noise of distant ringing. On the third ring Malcolm looked up with an expression of triumph, expecting the calm voice of the answer-phone to cut in at any moment. Instead a man in some distress answered and Malcolms victorious expression crashed down his face to form a pile on his chin.

"Clive? Is that you?" prompted Malcolm.

"I'm so, so sorry!" came the remorseful cry of his brother. "Oh God, I'm sorry! It was an accident! I never meant to hurt her…" The man dissolved into tears and bubbling nonsense.

DI Titney was already ringing out on his mobile when Malcolm slowly replaced the handset having been unable to get any sense from his distraught brother. He seemed entirely poleaxed. By shouting at him, the DI got Clives' address from Berrie and rapidly ordered two squad cars and four officers to go there immediately and make an aggravated arrest. He beeped his mobile phone off and turned back to stare at JC and Maddy. "It may, possibly, perhaps appear I could, conceivably, owe you both an apology, Mister Creek, Miss Magellan. I'll be sure to include your contribution to my investigation in my official report. Now you must all excuse me. I need to drive unfeasible quickly back to Hastings and prepare myself, physically and mentally, for eight hours of aggressive questioning and plea-bargaining-"

The telephone on the kitchen table rang, making everyone jump. The four stared at it in dumb surprise for a moment, until Malcolm stretched a tentative hand to it again. " Hello? Fairfield double three double seven."

After a second a woman's high-pitched voice was heard on the line. The great distance she was speaking from did nothing to disguise that she was sorely upset, to the point of fury.

"Oh? You heard about that did you? Well it can't be true because you're fine, aren't you? Aha, to paraphrase Mark Twain; Rumours of-"

A fresh barrage of squeaky abuse rudely cut him off. The only audible words were 'explanation', and 'sorry excuse for a human being'.

"It's a bit of a long story, Cat." Malcolm looked up with an expression that conveyed his embarrassed apologies. It also showed relief and a kind of bullied happiness. "But since you're paying for the call…"

As they again negotiated the twisty back roads of Kent, heading north towards her idea of civilisation again, Maddy was talking about the case. "You had me thinking the nuclear power plant at Dungeness was somehow involved there for a while. Instead you say it was Clives final letter of apology which with the key for you? It proved it was someone close to the Berries who had caused the whole thing. That established, you thought once the initial terror driven rush to frame Malcolm had run out of, err, fear propellant, what? Remorse had cut in?"

JC cheered up for a moment. "Something like that. What someone might do in shock and without long term planning could easily pray on his or her mind after the event. However you'll note he didn't feel remorseful enough to sign that letter. Arguably, if it hadn't been for our input, that letter could have looked like Malcolm had typed it himself to put his wife, and us, off the trail. Just for the record, you know Malcolm said Clive was his younger brother? Do you know how much younger? I asked him while you were in the toilet".

"Don't tell me. Twelve minutes?"

"Fifteen. How did you know?" JC was impressed and pleasantly surprised.

"It just sounded like you were going to congratulate me on last nights 'evil twin' reference. I don't know why. For the sake of, err, completeness?"

Jonathan nodded. "I was. So what do you think it was? Murder or manslaughter?"

"Only time will tell." The conversation stopped there for ten minutes. A mile or two later she popped her favourite Percy Sledge tape into the Volvo's old stereo to help elevate the awkward silence.

Pulling onto the motorway, an idea came to Maddy in a flash of inspiration. She looked over to where Jonathan sat thin lipped and smiled. "I know how you can film Adam producing a live squid from a top hat", she said. She felt the warm glow of one-up-man-ship.

Creek looked up from the ancient road atlas in mild amazement and thought for a moment. "If you're going to say just film it underwater, I've already pondered on that and you'd never get it to look right. You'd see it was trick photography in a moment." He slumped back to starring at the road atlas, glumly. The half-formed trick in question was rapidly becoming an albatross around his neck. He wandered why they couldn't just put it in a cunning wooden box and cut the Squid in half, like the good old days.

Maddy recovered quickly. With a half smile she said, "No that's not what I'd thought of at all". She gave an unconvincing laugh. "And if that's going to be your attitude to my offer of help, you can just bloody well stick it! God you're so right and annoyingly smug-faced all the time! If I was to pull over and beat you to death with a wheel wrench, right now, there's not a court in the land that would convict."

Jonathan, amused by her roller-coaster ride mood swings, gave her his special wan Sphinx smile. "I'm not right all the time, Maddy. I was wrong last night for example, at the hotel in Fairfield-on-sea. I should have asked for a double room."

"Really?" asked Maddy, suddenly struck by Jonathan's lovely eyes.

"Yes", replied Jonathan, "and smothered you in the night with a pillow."