‘Spot on. Thank you, Steve.’ Bloom deliberately referred to senior officers by their first name when working alongside the police. Civilians weren’t required to address officers by their rank and it reminded the team that Bloom and Jameson weren’t part of the normal hierarchy.

‘I couldn’t find much background on you, Mr Jameson,’ said Barker.

Jameson smiled. ‘Ex-MI6,’ he said.

Bloom felt the usual ripple of nervous energy spread across the room. The police, in particular, were often suspicious of Jameson’s Secret Service past.

After teas, coffees and packets of biscuits had been delivered by Steve’s PA, Bloom took centre stage.

‘We know that Faye Graham was the first person to receive one of these birthday cards. That was on January the fifth. You’ve probably seen the photograph I sent over last night but, for confirmation, it reads “Happy First Birthday” on the front, and then “Your gift is the game. Dare to Play?” on the inside. There’s no other information, but there is a small tacky patch at the bottom of the card. The other three cards have the same patch so we’re assuming something was stuck here originally.’

‘Why “Happy First Birthday”?’ said Barker, who was perched on the corner of one of the desks, his highly polished shoe resting on a chair.

‘Oh, she’ll come to that,’ said Jameson.

Bloom knew that Jameson had reservations about her hypothesis, so she was interested to see how the team reacted. ‘Faye Graham went missing that very day and hadn’t been in touch until she returned to the family home earlier this week. We understand from her son – Fred – that she then stabbed Harry Graham to death.’

This was clearly not news to the team.

‘Was there any phone activity for Faye Graham while she was missing?’ asked DC Kaye Willis.

‘She didn’t contact her family or her employer. We would need a warrant to access her phone records,’ said Bloom.

‘I’ll get on to that,’ said Willis.

‘And let’s check call histories for the others too,’ said Jameson. ‘I’ve looked at the social media accounts of all four and there’s been no activity since they went missing, but we need a more sophisticated examination of their activity over the last year or so. I want to know if they were accessing any particular groups or sites of interest.’

‘On it,’ said DC Craig Logan, making a note in his book.

‘Thank you,’ said Bloom. ‘Grayson Taylor, a twenty-year-old politics student at Sheffield University, received the same card and went missing after a night out to celebrate his birthday on February the tenth. Stuart Rose-Butler, a twenty-nine-year-old shelf-stacker from Leeds, then disappeared from the scene of a road-traffic accident on the morning of his birthday on February the twenty-fourth.’

‘We’ve an eye witness who claims they saw the driver of the other car pass a white card to Stuart before driving away,’ said Jameson.