He’d like to have thought of himself as a sidekick—the Robin to their Batman—but he was kidding himself. He was the Alfred to their Batman. Less than that, even. He was the guy who changed the oil on the Batmobile. Important, yes, but there were a million mechanics in Gotham City who could do the job just as well.

Dave spent some time thinking about Batman, as plastic hands crept at a glacial pace around the clock.

He liked Batman.

Five minutes later, he got himself blown to bits on another game of Minesweeper.

He checked his box of Exhibits.

No change.

God. He had to get away from his desk.

He wheeled himself backwards, then rolled across the Incident Room, steering himself between the other desks until he reached the Big Board. Sinead looked back at him and smiled.

“Alright?”

“Yeah, just thought I’d come check the board out,” Dave said. “Good to know where we’re up to.”

“Your guess is as good as mine,” came the reply, as Sinead finished pinning up seven index cards in a row across the top. “Just setting out what we know of the timeline.”

Dave scanned the cards. Several of them were blank. Most of them, in fact. “Is that when he was seen in Inverness?” he asked, pointing to the card second from the left, which had the words ‘Family at Railway Station’ written at the top and highlighted in yellow pen.

Sinead confirmed that it was. The person who had shared the photo on social media had asked a lot of questions when Hamza had got in touch, but had ultimately been eager to help. They were able to pinpoint the date to the Wednesday of the week before the attack—eight days prior to the family’s deaths. They had come in on a train around lunchtime, but Scotrail was still to provide CCTV from the station cameras that would verify this, and hopefully show their next movements.

“Want me to chase them up?” Dave asked.

“It’s fine. Hamza’s on it,” Sinead said.

Dave hid his disappointment behind a thumbs up. He would’ve enjoyed shouting at Scotrail. They didn’t, in his humble opinion, get shouted at nearly enough.

“Anything else I can do?” he asked. “I could phone the taxi companies and see if anyone remembers picking them up.”

“Already done,” Sinead replied, pinning up another card. “We’ve been in touch with all of them, but nobody remembers having them in their cars. So, we’re hoping the footage from the station will give us a company name. That’s if they even got in a taxi, of course. They might have walked somewhere, or got on a bus.”

“With two kids and a big bag of readies? Bold.”