Cole sent an image of Cecily Levin in classical Greek mode to the printer.

He pulled up Clay’s email address and summoned up his thoughts about the actress, who he’d read about on her Wikipedia page and some retro fan sites. He wondered if Eve had roped him in to give her a mental pressure drop.

Dear Eve,

Cecily Levin was a London-born actress whose career was at its peak throughout the 1960s and early 1970s. She toured extensively as a repertory actress performing in plays by numerous playwrights including Oscar Wilde, Noel Coward and William Shakespeare, to name but three. She joined the company of the Liverpool Everyman Theatre in the early 1970s alongside actors such as Jonathan Pryce and Julie Walters and lay down her roots here. She started breaking into TV with increasingly bigger roles in Z Cars, Coronation Street, Till Death Us Do Part, Dixon of Dock Green and the BBC’s Play For Today series. With TV exposure came parts in British films, mainly for Hammer, where she had solid parts in Twins of Evil, The Vampire Lovers, Lust For A Vampire and Dracula AD 1972.

She gave up her acting career when she married Terry Maguire, a local business mogul whose wealth came from building, tarmac, palettes, a fleet of taxis and several nightclubs across the north-west of England.

When she stopped acting she went completely off the radar and was effectively never heard of again.

You can see her acting on YouTube. All the Hammer Films are on there and some of the TV shows she was in.

Best wishes and take care,

Barney.

He picked up the image of Cecily Levin from the printer and pinned it on the board near the image of Richard Ezra gazing lovingly into the space where his wife, Sarah, had been airbrushed out of existence, the picture The Ghoul had sent to Annie Boyd and other women.

Cole walked down the noticeboard, looked at the images of Sandra O’Day, Annie Boyd and Amanda Winton dead in the watery places from which their bodies were recovered. He compared their images in death to their online profile photographs and was saddened enough to want to turn his back on the women.

But he didn’t do that. Instead, Cole looked at the images as a whole and, in the part of his brain where the dots formed that needed joining, he felt the pressure of their emerging existence.

The door of the incident room opened and his chain of thought was interrupted. A young constable who he’d never seen before entered and approached him, carrying an A4 envelope.

‘Detective Constable Cole?’

‘Yes. And you are?’

The constable handed the envelope to Cole. ‘Michael Bennett. Sergeant Harris asked me to come and give this to you. It was handed in at reception, just now.’

‘Thanks, Michael.’