The following morning, Eileen held an early briefing to go over the reports that had come in since the previous meeting, even though there was nothing new to discuss. They seemed to be doing a lot of talking, without making any progress. Every member of the team appeared frazzled so that for once Geraldine felt completely out of place with her colleagues. She was afraid her happiness would be obvious to everyone. Various officers put forward their theories about the case, each one vaguely plausible and all different. Ariadne suggested that Jason might have abducted Daisy after a violent argument with his wife.

‘Perhaps he thought she was unfit to look after a baby. Her own mother described her as emotional, didn’t she?’ Ariadne concluded. ‘And the neighbour told us Jessica and Jason had violent arguments.’

‘Anne told me Jessica’s “not what might be called level-headed”,’ Geraldine said, recalling the notes she had made at the time. ‘She said Jessica’s “very emotional, very difficult and highly strung”, and she used the words “unreasonable” and “hysterical” to describe her. And that was a mother talking about her own daughter whose baby had just been abducted.’

‘It’s a pretty damning opinion,’ Eileen remarked. ‘Although family members aren’t always the kindest judges of one another.’

‘If that’s what her adoring mother thought of her, Jason might have thought the same about Jessica and decided to take Daisy away from her,’ Ariadne said.

A constable suggested Jason might have taken Daisy after learning he wasn’t her biological father.

‘Why would he want to abduct her because he wasn’t her father?’ Geraldine asked.

‘To punish his wife?’ Ian suggested with a bitterness probably only Geraldine noticed. ‘For six months he helped take care of the baby, never questioning that she was his. He worked hard to support his family. Then he discovered he wasn’t the father of the child he had been led to believe was his own daughter. What better way to be revenged on his wife than to take her baby away from her?’

Others dismissed the idea of Jason being responsible for the disappearance of the baby, and thought he might have been murdered because he had witnessed her being taken by her biological father.

‘Perhaps he disturbed the father in the act of stealing the baby, and had to be silenced,’ another sergeant suggested.

‘None of this establishes who took the baby, or why,’ Eileen pointed out irascibly. ‘We can theorise until we’re all blue in the face, but we need evidence to show us what happened.’

The most credible explanation was still that the baby’s biological father had found out about his daughter and had come to the house to claim her, and Jason had then been killed trying to stop the real father from taking Daisy away.