All seemed in order. There was a total of three hundred and seven items of interest and it would cost a small fortune to get them all checked out in a lab. It was a fact of life that sometimes one had to weigh up the importance of the inquiry against the vast chunks of budget required to investigate properly. In an ideal world, Kelly would have her own police lab, attached to Eden House, as more crimes were solved now through DNA than any other method. But it was a pipe dream.

She noted that almost twenty of the exhibits were illegal substances, and a further ten contained drug-related paraphernalia, with the rest labelled as personal items possibly storing DNA: things like toothbrushes, hairbrushes, bed sheets, clothes and so on. Fenton’s photograph, from a social media platform, had been released to the press and Kelly reckoned they were close to smoking him out. They’d also released photos of the Cotton brothers from police files and informed the public that they’d like to speak to the men as a matter of urgency. It was standard language. She felt as though she was closing in on the key individuals. She had no idea how they fitted together yet, but she would.

She studied Tyrone’s photograph and noted the colour of his hair. It was a shaggy mess of ginger and chestnut, similar to the hairs found under Keira’s nails, but she knew that he could easily argue in a court of law that they’d had rough sex as girlfriend and boyfriend. Any DNA evidence would lead to reasonable doubt. The same could be said if it turned out to be Fenton’s skin cells under her nails. She turned to the clothes, which had all been photographed. They’d found a black hoody dumped in a washing basket in the bathroom. It was similar to the one he was wearing when he was filmed on CCTV shortly after his girlfriend’s fatal stabbing, and it had been sent away to be tested. The only way they could win over a jury was if Keira’s blood was apparent in excessive amounts on the clothes he was wearing on the day. Of course, the biggest red flag was his disappearance, proving that he didn’t care what had happened to Keira, but that too was circumstantial only. She needed hard evidence.