The Press Liaison officer contacted the local media only to find that they’d been pre-empted. Somebody had already been in touch with the Leominster News and Hereford Times, providing details of the two girls’ names and a suitably heart-wrenching photograph of both of them in sun hats. I recognised the background – it was definitely the Marstowes’ back garden. I spotted a red swing set I’d seen out the kitchen window. Somebody else had recognised it, too, because the assumption in the report was that Joanne Marstowe had contacted the press directly. It was too late for either of the newspapers to change their headlines, but local radio and BBC regional TV news sent journalists and agreed to run an appeal for information. The local news managers must have taken one look at the photograph of two pretty smiling eleven-year-old white girls in matching sun hats and wept tears of joy. The story went national in about the time it took the editors in London to open the jpeg attached to the email. By the time Inspector Edmondson was briefing all the new hands on deck at ten o’clock, the media was already assembling in the foyer.

I tried to remember what I’d been doing that night, but nothing came to mind.

Searches resumed at first light and there was a flurry of actions from the newly installed MIU, two hundred plus of which were TIEs on RSOs. Impressively, the MIU had completed over a hundred Trace Implicate or Eliminate on Registered Sex Offenders in Herefordshire alone and had farmed out a bunch more to adjacent police forces. As of when I was checking the list there were only three RSOs within two hundred kilometres of Rushpool that hadn’t been checked, and there was a strong suspicion that two of the remaining might be dead.

You can do a keyword search on HOLMES, the utility of which depends on what words you use. I tried, just for the hell of it, magic, wizard, witch, invisible, three different spelling variations of fairy and spent fifteen minutes weeding out a surprisingly large number of references to books, TV and a fancy dress party many of the kids had attended a week before the disappearance. One statement taken from a school friend of Nicole and Hannah’s caught my eye.

R175 H TST GABRIELLA DARRELL MISC

PC TASKER: So Nicole had an invisible friend.

GABRIELLA: Yes.

PC TASKER: Like an imaginary friend?

GABRIELLA: Not really.

MRS DARRELL: Nicole always was a very imaginative child. Not like Gaby here who’s very sensible. Aren’t you Gaby? No imaginary friends for you.

I added a restatementing to my action request list on the basis that if you don’t know where you’re going, try as many directions as possible.