‘I don’t know anything about the guy, do you? Regardless of what initial inquiries make of him – and I know he’s got no previous – he has to be investigated. Anyone who runs raises questions.’

Kelly nodded. ‘Who’s your chief commander? We need his permission to request Alexandros back.’

Matt nodded. ‘Look, this was sent from one of our teams at Ravensword.’ Kelly glanced at the screen. ‘It’s the staff car park on Tuesday morning.’

‘Is that Alexandros’s Corsa?’

‘Same.’

‘Can we identify him as the driver?’

‘Wait!’ Matt chided her. ‘Impatient as always.’ Kelly didn’t like the way he acted as though he was her best pal, intimately knowledgeable of all her little habits. But he did. And he had been.

‘There he is!’ she said. ‘So he parked up at 9.29 a.m. and made a phone call. Then he left. Zoom in,’ she said. ‘He looks pretty downcast.’

‘Let’s check the ANPR from Ravensword to his address,’ Matt said.

They got four more hits, proving that Alexandros Skarparis had left the car park, without clocking on, and then driven in the direction of Wanstead before seeming to take known routes back to central London an hour later.

‘Can we get in touch with the team at George’s house and check the witness statements for any sighting of a Greek Cypriot man?’

Matt nodded. They were aligned and it felt non-aggressive. Kelly was relieved. The thing she’d most dreaded when she’d found out the identity of the SIO was that they would come to loggerheads over minor details. They still had the same thought processes after all these years, and she didn’t need to explain her motivators and theories. He’d already thought of them.

Matt contacted the relevant team and had an officer trawl through the statements. Meanwhile, they were able to track the Corsa across east London to Bethnal Green. Footage from Bethnal Green Tube station caught Alexandros accessing the Central Line. They’d figured he must have caught the Tube to Heathrow and it was confirmed by one of the ticket office cameras. It had taken them almost an hour, but they now had his last movements in the UK, and the times added up. A further hit came in from the Highways Agency: Skarparis’s Vauxhall Corsa had been clamped outside Kentucky Fried Chicken in Bethnal Green Road.

A witness statement from one of George’s neighbours also had a sighting of a dark-skinned man in George’s garden on Tuesday. The same neighbour also said that a white van had parked outside around the same time. Nosy neighbours could be the best friend of the police sometimes. Three men got out of the van and entered the garden, but the dark-skinned man hid in the shed, which was why the occurrence had stuck in the neighbour’s brain.

‘Did the white van men leave with anything?’ Kelly asked.