Through blurry eyes, Mathew focussed on the pizza box lying about five feet in front of him. It made him feel happy. He didn’t take his eyes off it. Not for one second. Not until the man who had hurt him so badly bent down and picked it up. Mathew stared at the empty spot on the floor and imagined his pizza.

*

Within the hour, all of Gifford’s team was back in the squad room, having been stood down from pointlessly searching for the weapon or weapons used to assault Mathew. The atmosphere was electric. Gifford stood in his doorway, leaving the floor to Jack, as had become the norm. Gifford couldn’t help feeling jealous: he’d never before seen his team so together and so pumped. Jack saw it. It was the same look he’d seen on Ridley’s face in the past, so Jack went and stood firmly by Gifford’s side before addressing the room.

‘There are at least five people in this gang, and there’s also an inside man. This gang went to the Barrowmans’ thinking the place was empty, so there’s also an electronics expert, because they expected to have to bypass the high-tech security system. They use a scout on a motorbike to clear the way, and they use a horsebox to get the bigger stuff out. They wouldn’t have known till they arrived that Barrowman’s artworks and furniture weren’t worth nicking, so let’s assume they came prepped with a horsebox.’

Gifford piped up. ‘We’ve got our biker and our horsebox on CCTV, but it gives us nothing useful as yet.’

‘It does,’ Jack explained. ‘It gives us patterns. The roads round here are straight and long. No back alleys and a limited number of short-cuts. They have to be staying somewhere. They have to have a base. There will be a geographical pattern that our biker and our horsebox are drawing across your landscape. We just need to find it.’

Both men looked at Bevan. ‘I’ll find it, sirs,’ she said with a grin. Then she spun her chair round back to her computer and began furiously tapping away.

*

In the next thirty minutes, Jack and Gifford worked together to allocate the right job to the right officer. One was tasked with enhancing CCTV images of the men who entered the Barrowmans’ property to establish height and build. A second was tasked with trying to track the horsebox. And two were sent back to the house to supervise the CSIs in cordoning off the bushes either side of the driveway gate so they could be examined for footprints at first light. The only fly in the ointment was the arrival of the forensics report on Mr Bright-Cullingwood’s office space, which revealed one set of unidentified fingerprints, which showed no match to anyone on the CRIMINT database.

A text message from Oaks pinged through: