A sick flush of adrenaline. Since the discovery of the blood and hair in the trough, further news was unlikely to be good. ‘Has Violet been found?’ I said Violet but we all knew I meant body parts.

‘No. But I think you’ll find it very … interesting.’

Craig was oozing smugness. Whatever was going on had to be bad, and it involved me, but I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of seeing that I was concerned. ‘Okay, thanks for letting me know, Craig. Come on, Fiona.’

‘What’s he up to, the slimy sod?’ Fiona said as I led her down the corridor.

‘I dread to think. No doubt we’ll find out later. We’d better see the parents. I hope they haven’t been anywhere near the internet.’

17

Violet’s parents were in one of our more pleasant interview rooms. It smelled of lemon air-freshener, and it even had a window. Violet’s father stood stiffly with his chest thrust forward, clearly reluctant to sit on one of our grubby-looking chairs. He wore a suit that seemed to have been bought for a more svelte version of himself, and a polyester shirt that looked desperately wrong for the weather. ‘Are you in charge?’ he said, making it clear that me being in charge would not be a good thing.

Helen Armstrong, Violet’s mother, looked up and snapped, ‘Come on, Roy, you’re not helping.’ She was better dressed than her husband, in linen trousers and a neatly ironed blouse. I’d have bet that she’d been impeccably made-up earlier, but it was falling apart – mascara staining below her eyes and foundation drifting downwards. I realised with a jolt of unease that I was assessing the pair of them for TV-appeal-worthiness.

Fiona was next to me, her young femaleness possibly adding to Roy’s feelings that the case was not in safe hands.

Roy threw himself onto the seat next to his wife and sighed loudly. ‘Are you doing anything at all to find her?’

I took that as rhetorical. We’d given them huge detail on our efforts. Roy Armstrong would have been well up there with the suspects if he hadn’t been so definitively out of the country when his daughter disappeared. Guilt could manifest as belligerence – I knew that for sure.

We’d decided not to share the information about the blood and hair in the pig troughs. No evidence of any other remains had been found, although admittedly the abattoir waste from the morning was still AWOL. My earlier hope that Violet might be alive was seeping away, but I didn’t want her parents to realise that yet. ‘We need to know everything about Violet,’ I said. ‘Obviously she has a very public persona, but we need to dig beneath that. The clues will be there. So please tell us anything you can think of.’

Helen dabbed at her eyes. ‘She’s a lovely girl.’