Hawkins moved forwards, picking up the room’s familiar humid funk: warm silicon over stale sweat. She also noted a second figure at the back of the room, hunched at a terminal, long tousled hair unkemptly framing heavy, rounded cheeks.

DS Roger Snell.

The sergeant brushed wayward locks from his eyes. ‘Hi, Antonia, nice to see you.’

‘Roger.’ She studied the deeper shadows in the far corner. ‘No Pritesh tonight?’

‘No.’ He picked up the nearest of four Red Bull cans on his desk, shook it, and swapped it for the next before taking a swig. ‘Lucky so-and-so’s at his sister’s wedding in Sri Lanka.’

‘Good for him.’ Hawkins took a chair from the adjacent workstation and wheeled it across. ‘So, what do we have?’

‘Footage from outside the property near that old church,’ Frank said. ‘Camera’s mounted on the gatepost.’

‘You got the owners.’ She sat, pleased she had directed the DI’s Jack Russell-like instincts towards tracking down the occupant, who hadn’t responded to any previous attempts the team had made at contact. ‘What happened?’

He shrugged. ‘This is just their countryside retreat, according to Land Registry – whacking great place about half a mile inside the gate. Family’s got places like it all over the world, and not enough time to actually live in any of them. Anyway, purely by happenstance, Mrs Kathryn Saul is over from her main residence in sunny España, spending a few days at her Chelsea flat when I ring, and agrees to help. Flash dame logs into her gate-cam remotely and pings me the file, just like that. Now, if I can just remember the bloody sequence.’ He began clicking through menus at the top of the screen.

‘How far back does it go?’ Hawkins asked.

‘Not far enough to catch sight of our victims, if that’s what you mean.’ Frank jabbed at seemingly disobedient keys. ‘System’s temperamental, apparently, keeps wiping stuff to make space, so we were lucky to catch this.’ He sat back. ‘That’s it, ye bugger. Here we go.’

One of the windows on the large monitor jumped to the front, expanding to almost fill the screen, a rotating symbol appearing to denote buffering. From the still image, Hawkins recognized the tree-lined driveway she and Chris had used the previous afternoon to park near Cold Christmas church. At the top of frame, a dark, angular shape had broken the upper edge.

Unfortunately, the camera’s downward angle caught only the final few yards of track.

‘Whole shebang’s motion-sensitive,’ Frank explained, ‘to get a decent look at anyone who drives up to the front entrance, so you see nowt unless it comes close to the gate. That saves memory space, of course, which is handy, because this sequence happened three weeks back. It’ll play on quarter speed.’