“No one in their right mind would be.” Rosie laid three jackets out on the bed. “Have you still got the clip on your mobile?”

“Yeah, here.” He opened the file and tossed his phone into the middle of the bed. Thanks to a friend on the TAU, he’d acquired the unexpurgated CCTV footage shortly after the arrest.

“That jacket’s missing,” she said, comparing Peel’s outfit in the video to the clothing she had taken from his wardrobe. “And he wasn’t wearing it this morning.”

Kash peered over her shoulder to examine a freeze-framed image. “Might be hung up downstairs, or in the wash.”

“I’ll double-check with Smiffy. The jeans are too nondescript for me to tell, but that shirt’s not here either.”

“That raises a big red flag.”

“Aye.” She keyed Smiffy’s point-to-point code into her radio. “Doesn’t it just?”

Twenty minutes later, as Rosie helped Kash upend the mattress, Smiffy radioed to confirm that neither the jacket nor the shirt had been found in any of the obvious places.

“I’ve spoken to DS Merritt, and she’ll mention it in the interviews,” he said. “But Peel has already started playing silly buggers. When the custody sarge asked him to confirm his name, he said ‘no comment.’”

“I bet you a fiver he cracks,” Rosie said. “Give him a couple of hours in a windowless cell, wearing manky custody-issue sweat pants, without a phone, not knowing when someone will look in and catch him on the loo. He’ll be singing like a canary as soon as Merritt offers him a brew and a butty.”

“A fiver, eh?” Smiffy said. “You’re on. I’ll come up and shake on it when we’re done in the kitchen.”

“I’d have gone for a tenner,” Kash said, hooking his thumbs beneath the fitted sheet and stripping it from the mattress. “Peel won’t last half an hour with Steph.”

“Smiffy never bloody pays up anyway. He still owes me from that…” The thought went nowhere as the edge of the mattress hit the overhead light and set it swinging, the bulb’s beam playing over an irregular bump in the mattress’s base that she hadn’t previously noticed. “Just lower this again, gently,” she said, and Kash did as she asked, bringing the bump into reach. She slid her fingers over it until she found a small tear she could fit her hand into. She reached inside and pulled out a mobile phone and a leather wallet.

“Would you look at that,” Kash said as she held them up. “He had his mobile on him when he was arrested.”

“Not this one,” she said. The phone was fully charged and locked, and the wallet was stuffed with twenty-pound notes. “What’s Mr. Two-point-four-kids doing with a burner?”

“Renting another kid,” Kash said with rare hostility.