The one present she had received she left on the coffee table as she went to work. Confirmation of two flights to Rome, a gift from Umpire who’d got up at 5.30 to make her breakfast in bed. She was both thrilled and shocked at his generosity – Rome was a city she’d never visited but had always longed to. The fact that he’d booked the trip for September also gave her reason to smile – they hadn’t discussed the future so it was nice to receive confirmation that he saw them still being together months down the line.

Renshaw was in a tetchy mood as the team gathered in the incident room.

‘Right, settle down,’ she said as DC Burton, the last through the door, slid into a seat at the front of the room between Maggie and Nathan. Byford was seated in the row behind them.

‘We’ve got the go-ahead to bring in the dogs. But something else of significance has happened that I want to discuss first. Last night, one of the outbuildings in the grounds of Rushbrooke was set on fire.’ Renshaw slapped a picture of what appeared to be a sports pavilion on the board behind her. ‘This was how the building looked before. Someone driving past spotted smoke and called it in before the fire took hold completely, so it’s still standing, just about. But it looks like someone set fire to a sofa inside by pouring some kind of fuel on it. The fire service are treating it as suspected arson.’

‘Do you think it’s related to Benji’s death?’ asked Nathan.

‘I’m not ruling anything out,’ said Renshaw. ‘Someone took a massive risk breaking into the school grounds last night to set it on fire when we’ve been crawling all over the site for days.’

‘It’ll have been kids,’ said Byford nonchalantly. ‘Daring each other because we’ve been hanging around the place.’

‘Yes, it could’ve been,’ Renshaw admitted, ‘but my gut tells me not. The timing is too much of a coincidence.’

‘Do we know why there was a sofa in there?’ asked Maggie. ‘The Pavilion – that’s what it’s known as – used to be the old changing rooms, but it’s been out of bounds to the kids for ages. A sofa seems a bit weird.’

Renshaw frowned. ‘How do you know that?’

‘A couple of years ago some parents organized a big fundraising drive to pay for a refurb but it ended up being too expensive. So it’s been abandoned for ages. Last I heard the school was trying to get a Lottery grant to do it up.’

‘That’s interesting, because there were actually two sofas inside. We can check with Mrs Pullman exactly what the building was being used for when we head up there,’ said Renshaw.