Although Becky had finally managed to persuade Sharon Carter to come in and take a look at the CCTV footage to see if she recognised the car she had seen, sadly she had been unable to narrow the search down by much. It didn’t help that the roads had been gritted on the night Sharon went to the Flash, and black muddy water was splattered over so many number plates that most of them were illegible. In addition, it was a busy stretch of road even in the early hours of the morning, and they didn’t know which direction the car had come from.

Becky pushed herself to her feet. ‘Where are we off to?’

‘I want to go back to Pennington Flash. We focused on the location of the body last time. I know the local officers are very familiar with the area, but I’m not getting any sense of why the girl went, or was taken, there to die. I’ve no idea if it will help, but maybe I’ll be hit by some sort of revelation. Come on. We’ll take my car.’

Becky’s driving had become considerably calmer since she had nearly drowned all those months ago, but Tom still found it erratic, slightly disconcerting and not conducive to logical thinking. And that was what they needed – cold, hard analysis mixed with some brainstorming that might initially seem wide of the mark but would stop them becoming too entrenched in any one explanation.

Tom asked himself what they knew, and it wasn’t much. Sharon Carter had seen two people, one of whom was almost certainly Penny, heading towards the hide. The other person – presumed male – very probably either assisted Penny’s suicide or murdered her. It seemed she had gone with him willingly, but had she known she was going to die? Was she complicit? Maybe some form of depression would account for the cocktail of drugs she had been taking. But the suggestion that it was an assisted suicide seemed to have dampened the enthusiasm of the team a little. The energy generated by a straightforward case of murder just wasn’t there. Tom needed some ideas to rejuvenate the investigation, and there was no one better than Becky to help him voice his occasionally wild theories. Right now, though, he didn’t have any theories – wild or otherwise.

The road to the Flash had been blocked by snow for days before the woman was found, but Tom was fairly certain that some die-hard twitchers would have made their way through to check out the birds. Somehow they needed to reach these people and find out what they had seen. Either the dead woman or the person who helped her had to have known that this hide wasn’t locked, and perhaps they had paid the location a visit in the days immediately before she died.