Back at Leominster nick I called up the exhibit list and found the reports related to both the girls’ mobile phones. They were found at the foot of yet another war memorial, this one a skinny cross set in a raised grassy dais by the B4362 where the lane that runs up parallel to Rushpool to the east switches over to become the lane that runs up the hill to somewhere called Bircher Common. Which appeared to be both the name of a hamlet and your actual piece of open land for public use. I printed the sketch map and photographs of the site which recorded the exact position of the phones. Then I checked the POLSA notes which hypothesised that Hannah and Nicole had taken the footpath west across the fields until they reached Pound Lane, and walked north up the lane until it reached the B4362 where they had become separated from their phones. The crossroad quickly became the loci of two types of searches, one based on the assumption that the girls had travelled on by foot and the second on the assumption that they had voluntarily or involuntarily climbed into a vehicle driven by person or persons unknown.

The POLSA and their search teams were covering option one, MIU were covering option two – which was a horrible job. With no CCTV and limited ANPR – that’s automatic number plate recognition to you, Winston – MIU had to rely on canvassing local witnesses for information about car movements in and out of the area. And even in the countryside nobody’s that nosy at five o’clock in the morning. Still, they had managed to amass a staggering number of car sightings around both Rushpool and the crossroads where the phones were found. These ranged from Some kind of van that might have been white to I saw that Citroën belonging to Will Whitton what lives over the hill in Orelton and was up to no good and no mistake.

Five officers had been assigned to grind their way through these reports. You could tell who they were by the pitiful groans and low moans of despair that floated up from their corner of the incident room.

I noticed from the action list that they were prioritising the period from four to six in the morning – which puzzled me until I found a cross link to the statement by Nicole’s mother that she had first noticed her daughter missing at five in the morning. When asked why she hadn’t raised the alarm then, she said that Nicole often got up at first light in the summer.

‘She likes to watch the sun come up,’ she said.

The evidence entry for the girls’ mobiles had contact details for a Kimberly Cidre at the High Tech Crime Unit in Worcester, and I gave her a ring on the basis that if you want something done fast it’s better to talk than to email.