The interview room at Leominster’s cell block was as clean and as unused as the rest of the station. It was also missing the table that we in the Met have long come to see as an indispensable prop to bang papers on, push cigarettes across, make coffee rings on and, in extremis, put our head down on for a quick kip while no one was looking. Instead, there were two rows of three chairs bolted so that one row faced the other – just over an easy punching distance apart. There was nowhere to put papers or support one of those yellow legal pads while making notes. The briefs must hate it – which, speaking as police, I definitely saw as a feature not a bug.

Dominic who, unlike me, had done a couple of PIP courses (Professionalising Investigation Process) in interviewing, said that the open set-up allowed you to see the suspect’s – sorry, the interview subject’s – whole body language. You’d be surprised how many people nervously tap their foot when being questioned and how often the frequency of the tapping depends on how close to the truth you are.

Our ‘interview subject’ had brown hair, small narrow-set blue eyes and an unfortunate nose – he also had a foot tap that just wouldn’t quit. He looked like someone who knew he’d been a naughty boy.

Which was how Dominic had tracked him down, by asking himself what kind of no-good would someone have to be up to not to want to help the police with their inquiries. Given the quiet rural nature of the area, the list was distressingly long, ranging from sheep rustling, poaching, agricultural vehicle theft – a top of the line tractor being more expensive than a Lamborghini and much easier to sell in Eastern Europe – to fly-tipping and public indecency. Even hardened criminals, especially those that consider themselves the salt of the earth trying to get by, will come forward on cases involving missing kids. But none had. And, besides, a quick check revealed that nothing majorly criminal had occurred that night. Dominic figured that if it wasn’t fear of prosecution it might be sexual shame. And since Bircher Common, just up the lane from where the phones were found, was the local dogging site he concentrated his initial efforts on cars sighted accessing the common late that night. Fortunately, some of the locals, fed up with having their beauty sleep disrupted by the nocturnal revelries, had taken to noting down number plates. Fifteen minutes on the computer had got him a list of names and addresses and, by the time I was fetching Beverley out of captivity, he was knocking at the front door of the first on the list. One Russell Banks of Green Lane, Leominster.