‘Mrs Ackroyd’s golden,’ I said. ‘So we need a serious look at the Animal Vigilantes. They know too much, they’ve made some very nasty comments online, they put that banner up, and they sent the aggressive mob to Gary’s house.’

Jai fanned himself. ‘The ringleader of the aggressive mob has a cast-iron alibi for Sunday night. But you’ve arranged an interview with the leader of the Animal Vigilantes, haven’t you?’

I checked my watch. ‘Yes. Shortly. There’s also been a development on Violet’s parentage. We’ve spoken to Bex Smith, Violet’s birth mother. She was raped – she’d passed out and doesn’t know who did it. But both Daniel Twigg and Gary Finchley were there at the time. She’s sure it was one of them.’

Sharp intakes of breath all round.

‘See if they’ll submit voluntarily to paternity testing,’ I said. ‘And there was a third man there – Kirsty’s boyfriend. Bex doesn’t think it was him, but see if you can track him down just in case. Where are we at with other stuff?’

‘We checked Tony Nightingale’s alibi,’ Jai said. ‘A call was made from his landline to Bex Smith’s phone at the same time that Violet’s car was spotted by Mrs Ackroyd and then confirmed on CCTV. The voicemail confirms it was him. Also, someone watched catch-up TV at his house just after that, and he lives alone, so it’s unlikely that he went anywhere with Violet. In terms of the implications of having another relative, his will splits everything fifty-fifty between Bex and Kirsty, so Violet turning up wouldn’t make any difference to them.’

‘Okay, good. Anything on Violet’s laptop?’ I turned to Emily, one of our best tech people. When she’d arrived the previous year she’d been so shiny and sparkly I’d practically had to wear sunglasses, but she’d faded. Contact with sex offenders’ laptops could do that to a girl.

‘We obviously haven’t gone through it all yet,’ Emily said. ‘But she’s done lots of research on finding lost parents. Also on whether online comments ever turn to real violence. And on this myth of the Pale Child. We don’t have access to all her social media at this stage. We’re working through what we have.’

‘There’s no phone data for her since Sunday afternoon,’ Craig said. ‘But we’ve got details of the numbers she called before everything went dead, and there are shedloads of them over the last few weeks, but she made calls in batches. It looks like she might have been trying to speak to everyone who lived in the village in 1999. We’re working our way through them.’

‘No phone calls after she left Tony Nightingale’s house?’

‘Not with the phone we know about.’