‘We think the names on the stones are just old graffiti. The inscription scraped on the ground is more recent. It looks like “STRIDE”. If it means anything at all to anybody, speak up.’

Nobody spoke. They were looking at two more photographs on the board behind Tailby. There were two women, alive and smiling at the camera, though the one on the left looked guarded, maybe a little bit haughty, as if the photographer were taking a liberty getting her in the shot.

‘Are we looking at the same assailant in both cases?’ said Tailby. ‘Someone who was practising, as it were, on the earlier victim, Maggie Crew? Are we looking at someone who has succeeded in perfecting his technique with Jenny Weston?’

It was a very strange idea of perfection. Ben Cooper looked to see whether the other officers were reacting the same way. But most of them showed no surprise at the irony of the thought. Then something made him glance towards the far side of the room. Leaning casually against a desk was Diane Fry. She’d had her fair hair cut even shorter, and it gave an angular look to her lean face. He was sure she had lost weight, too. She had been slim before, but now there was a suggestion of something taut and thinly-stretched.

‘Don’t let ideas like that distract you,’ said Tailby. ‘We are treating this incident as an entirely separate enquiry, until the evidence proves otherwise. At this stage, we’re concentrating on collecting information. All right?’

His audience seemed to take this as a cue to start shuffling their papers again, looking for what information there already was. Cooper dragged his eyes away from Fry and did the same. At this stage, the information was pretty thin. Forensics results were awaited. Initial witness reports were sparse. True, they had details of Jenny Weston – who she was, where she lived, what she had done for a living. The minute details of her life were starting to emerge. But there was nothing to show what had made her go cycling on Ringham Moor on an early November afternoon, and why she had ended up dead among the Nine Virgins.

‘Somebody must have seen Jenny before she was killed. Maybe, just maybe, somebody also saw her killer. So have we got any leads so far? Paul?’

DI Hitchens stood up, straightening his jacket, looking much smarter this morning in his dark grey suit.

‘We’re looking at the likelihood that the killer arrived at Ringham Moor by car,’ he said. ‘We’ve already visited the houses close to the parking places on the edges of the moor, and we’ve collected a list of vehicles that were noticed around the time of the incident. It goes without saying that the vast majority of those vehicles will be totally impossible to trace. We’re lucky, though. If it had been the height of summer, it would be a lot worse.’