‘It’s possible that her first name is either Mandy, Amanda abbreviated with a y on the end, or Mandie, with an ie ending. She has a tattoo. She spells her name MAND hyphen E, all capitals. If you could look for any woman on your site using this name, I’d be very, very grateful, Emily.’

‘My staff and I will do our best. We’ll drop everything and concentrate on what you’ve asked us to do.’

There was a pause as she made her way past a bank of animated voices. The door to her office closed and there was a bleak silence behind her.

‘I built this company up from nothing,’ she said. ‘I’ve given people work and brought happiness to thousands of lonely hearts. There are plenty of internet dating sites out there. Why mine? Why me?’

‘You’ve been unlucky, Emily. We are looking into other sites as well, to see if the killer’s been operating from them.’

He heard the sound of her inhaler and imagined the vice gripping her chest and weighing down on her lungs.

‘When this comes out…’ She made a noise that was at once loaded with contempt and self-pity. ‘Let’s just say an expression with the words rats and sinking ship comes to mind.’

There was a knock on her door.

‘Come in. What have you got for me, Jayne?’

‘Liverpool-based addresses for Richard Ezra and Danny Guest.’

Hendricks smiled as he picked up his pen.

‘Jayne, we’re looking for a Liverpool-based woman called Mandy. I’ll give you the detail in a minute. What are the men’s addresses?’

‘Danny Guest’s based at 134 Addingham Road. Richard Ezra’s at 66 Springwood Avenue.’

Hendricks listened and wrote with thunder rumbling in the distance and the sky above him sagging under the weight of darkening clouds.

‘Thank you. Thank you very much.’

35

10.59 am

Detective Constable Clive Winters, a tall, heavily built black man in his forties, watched the second piece of film he’d identified from the high-quality CCTV footage emailed over to him by security from the Echo Arena.

He watched people walking in the general direction of Otterspool Promenade and others walking towards the Museum of Liverpool.

Annie Boyd was a lone pinpoint, identifiable from the smart black coat she wore to impress her blind date and protect herself from the wind blasting off the River Mersey to her left.

‘Hello, Annie,’ he said to the screen of his laptop as she came closer to the Echo Arena’s camera, a black speck turning into a more human form, recognisable from the first piece of footage from the Marina around the corner from the place where she’d parked her silver Renault Megane. She took out her iPhone and Winters guessed she was talking to her friend Cathy Jones, their last conversation as reported to DCI Eve Clay.