Potting looked back at him bleakly. ‘I googled laryngeal cancer after I left the surgery. It has one of the worst survival rates of any cancer.’

‘Then stop googling it, OK? That’s an order. Think positive. That’s another order.’ Grace stared hard at him, their eyes meeting. ‘I know it’s easy for me to say, Norman, but really, please keep thinking positive.’

‘Understood, chief. I’d rather you didn’t – you know, tell anyone just yet.’

‘Of course.’

20

Monday 2 September

Grace and Branson sat opposite each other at the small round meeting table in the Detective Superintendent’s office. They had mugs of coffee and Grace’s fast-emptying packet of chocolate digestives in front of them, as Branson, complaining he hadn’t had lunch, worked through them. Two photographic prints of Eden Paternoster, from the digital images they’d been emailed, also lay there, one with the background of the Parham House lake and the other in front of a Christmas tree.

‘Any more thoughts, Glenn – other than how many crumbs you can drop on my table?’

‘Sorry, boss!’ Branson swept them dismissively onto the floor with his hand and grabbed yet another biscuit. ‘The Amazing Disappearing Eden Paternoster!’ Then he looked apologetic. ‘I’m sorry, that was a bit insensitive.’

Grace shook his head. ‘I’m over it – long over it.’

‘Doesn’t something like this bring it back?’

He nodded, wistful for a moment. ‘Always. And if Eden has genuinely disappeared, then I’d feel something of the husband’s pain, yes. But this doesn’t smell at all right to me. The husband says she went into the store to get cat litter and disappeared. But his car isn’t picked up by any camera out in the car park, his wife isn’t picked up going into the store and she’s not been caught on any camera inside the store. We know from the staff that he was there, but no one can recall seeing her, although they must see hundreds of people every day. And in any case, my sense – hunch – is this is more than just a routine misper situation, especially with what John Alldridge noticed.’

Branson studied the photographs for a moment. ‘Nice-looking lady. I agree, but maybe we should have a chat with Mr Paternoster – don’t you think?’ He reached over and rummaged in the now almost empty packet. ‘No passport smacks to me of someone doing a runner – with a lover – possibly?’

Grace looked thoughtful. ‘Possibly. How about we drop in on him, unannounced, and have a friendly, sympathetic chat?’

Holding up half a biscuit, with a cartoon-like bite shape missing, Branson replied, ‘Good plan, boss.’ The rest of the biscuit disappeared.

‘I do have a hypothesis.’

‘Yes?’ Branson asked.

‘Maybe she got too close to your chomping jaws and you mistook her for a chocolate digestive.’

‘That’s not even slightly funny.’

As Glenn pulled out onto the main road a few minutes later and accelerated ferociously, Grace said, subtly trying to make him slow down, ‘Um, you know how you often see flowers attached to trees at the scene of a fatal?’