For the hard-working lower ranks of the police force there is no entertainment quite as thrilling as watching your senior officer conducting a press conference. Not only is there the possibility that it might be humorously embarrassing, but also if it goes very badly it’s useful to have advance warning so one can make oneself scarce. Officers of Inspector rank and above are a power in the land, and they don’t like to be mildly contradicted let alone thwarted or shown up in public. I’m sure I wasn’t the only officer in the incident room watching the TV and coming up with a convenient list of actions which would keep me far away from Leominster nick – just in case.

It started out normally enough, with Inspector Edmondson and DCI Windrow sitting at a table elevated on a podium and doing their best gruff, matter of fact, nothing to see here, just doing our job with understated professionalism, manner. We are the police and we have brought order out of chaos – believe it, bruv!

It took them about ten minutes to run down the list of allegations, and why they were bollocks. No evidence that any member of the Marstowe family was involved in the kidnap, no evidence that any member of the local traveller community had been involved, and no evidence of an informal network of child-smuggling camps. Once Windrow had finished, a couple of journalists asked him whether he was one hundred per cent sure that the Marstowe family was not involved and that there weren’t gypsies roaming the land stealing children and illegally living off incapacity benefit – cross his heart and hope to die.

Windrow repeated himself in the manner of a man who was perfectly happy to sit there and repeat himself until everybody got bored and went home. Unaccountably, he failed to raise the working theory that the children had been abducted by faeries.

It’s just that sort of deception, I thought, that breeds distrust of the police.

Sharon Pike certainly distrusted the police, because she stood up and demanded to know what about Harry Plimpton.

‘Who Nicole identified by name as one of the men that held her,’ she said.

I looked at Dominic to see if the name meant anything to him – his face screwed up in concentration.

‘Andy’s aunt’s daughter’s son,’ he said after a moment. ‘Second cousin. You met him at the sheep roast.’

I was impressed. In my family once you got past niece or uncle it was all cousins, and even that tended to include any random former stranger who’d managed to get his feet under the table.

I heard a flurry of activity from the incident room as someone looked up the relevant nominal on HOLMES. Meanwhile, Windrow stalled by asking where and when the identification had taken place.