‘We’ve ruled out the ex-husband, Martin Stafford. All the old boyfriends in Jenny’s address book have been eliminated. If there was a more recent one, she didn’t bother to put his number in the book. It would have been unlike her, though. She was well organized in other ways. And there’s the note we took from her house. “Buy some fruit-flavoured ones,” it said. That had to be a boyfriend, surely.’

‘Perhaps the man the neighbours saw wasn’t looking for Jenny Weston, but for Ros Daniels,’ said Jepson. ‘She had already disappeared by then.’

‘Whoever the killer was, he was very audacious,’ said Tailby. ‘And very lucky.’

There had been a number of public appeals during the past week. But no one had come forward to say they had seen a man on the moor at the right time.

‘We have a partial footprint and a smear of sweat on the bike frame. We have the shape of a knife blade. But it’s really nothing at all. Nothing – without evidence to place a suspect at the scene.’

Tailby paused, as if unsure how his next statement would be received. Jepson noticed the hesitation and fixed the DCI with his sharp blue eyes.

‘Yes, Stewart? What are you going to say? Is it something I don’t want to hear?’

‘Could be.’

Jepson sighed again. ‘I didn’t really think things could be worse. But go on.’

‘If you don’t mind,’ said Tailby, ‘I’d like to wait for Paul Hitchens and Diane Fry to join us at this stage.’

Diane Fry limped up the stairs towards the incident room. Earlier, she had been writing up her report on the attack on Calvin Lawrence and Simon Bevington the previous night, and her mind was still full of images from the moments immediately after the mob had scattered in the quarry. She saw the scene that PC Taylor’s headlights had illuminated. She saw the rain glittering like knives in the twin beams; she saw the bright, jagged holes in the windows of the VW van, and the walls of the quarry black outside the range of the lights. And she saw Stride sprawled half-naked in the mud on his face, with the broom handle still bloodily protruding, his body writhing like a worm cut into pieces.