‘Not really. There was a woman on one of the trips who behaved in a very strange way the whole time, but when I asked her where she was from and tried to get some details of where she worked, I freaked her out. She was hiding something, I’m sure of it, and I had planned to find her when I got back.’

‘And did you?’ Tom asked.

‘No. I didn’t know enough about her. People generally don’t share their surnames, and I don’t know anyone smart enough to hack the travel company’s website for more details.’

‘Yes, you do.’

The voice came from behind Tom and his heart sank. He closed his eyes for a second. When he opened them he looked at Nathan, whose gaze had travelled to the door to the dining room. His expression hadn’t altered, and there was not so much as a flicker of surprise in his eyes. Tom could see why he was such a good poker player.

‘Jack,’ Nathan said nonchalantly, as if he had been expecting him the whole time.

‘Nathan,’ Jack replied, and walking over to the table, he sat down.

CHAPTER 53

53

Becky wasn’t sure whether to call Tom. She knew he wouldn’t mind, but it was his day off after all, and he deserved some time to himself. He seemed to have lost a bit of his usual chirpiness that morning, and she had the feeling there was something more going on than his frustration with a boring meeting. He was always grumpy about what he called a ‘gathering of the great and the good’, but it was usually little more than a light-hearted moan.

The case they had taken on in Crumpsall was all in hand. Keith was in charge of collating the evidence, and she was confident she could leave it in his hands for now. She was keen to get back to the Jasmine DuPont investigation and would have really appreciated Tom’s input on the latest bit of information they had received.

On balance, though, she thought her news could wait until the next day. There wasn’t much they would be able to do with so few facts, but at Tom’s suggestion they had dug out the file of the woman found on the golf course, and it had proved interesting. She had been missing from home for over eight months before she was found. And prior to that she had been attending a depression support group. It wasn’t a bereavement group like Jasmine’s, but it was close enough to be interesting.