Back in the car, Diane Fry called in for an update on the other lines of enquiry. The teams canvassing neighbours in Totley had found someone who remembered a man looking for Jenny two weeks’ previously, asking for her by name. The man was described as being of medium height and ordinary. He had been quite respectably dressed, and had spoken in a local accent. Very useful.

A second neighbour, who lived nearly opposite Jenny’s house in The Quadrant, recalled a strange car parked in the road one night. A man had been sitting in it, but he had driven off at about the time that Jenny had left her house.

A third witness reported a light-coloured van, possibly an old Ford Transit or something similar, which had passed slowly along the road twice. At the time, the neighbour had thought it might be gypsies – ‘totters’, he called them – looking for scrap, or anything they could steal.

Several neighbours recalled female visitors to Jenny’s home, including a girl with dark dreadlocks who had attracted particular attention in The Quadrant for a while. Dreadlocks were rare in Totley.

All the fragments of information had been passed to the officers interviewing Jenny’s colleagues at Global Assurance. But none of the colleagues could remember Jenny ever complaining of being harassed by a disgruntled boyfriend. If it had been her ex-husband trying to get back in touch, Jenny had not confided the fact to anyone. But the incident room staff would put the information into the HOLMES system. Correlations might be thrown up. Just one detail could send the whole enquiry in a new direction.

DI Hitchens had been on the mobile phone to the DCI back at Divisional Headquarters in West Street. When he finished the call, Hitchens turned to Fry and told her what they wanted her to do next.

‘You’ve got to be joking,’ she said. But he wasn’t.

Mark Roper rattled a fork against the plastic bowl. Three cats appeared from the shrubbery at the end of the garden – a grey one and two tabbies. They ran with their tails in the air and brushed themselves against Mark’s legs until he put their bowls on the ground and they began to gnaw at their chunks of meat.

While they ate, Mark went to clean out the bedding for the rabbits and freshen the water in their cages. The rabbits stared at him through the mesh, twitching their noses as they sniffed his familiar smell. For a while, Mark sat on an upturned milk crate to watch the cats feed.