He raised his arms, waving into the air as he went: ‘That’s what they say!’

‘You know him, then?’ asked Joe when he’d gone.

‘Gwyn? Since he was a kid. He’s a Batley boy, through and through.’

‘Small town, eh?’

‘He lived up the road from us. You didn’t know?’

‘Why should I? He works in Leeds.’

‘We were at school together. He was a couple of years below me. I encouraged him to join the Force, as it happens.’

‘Well, he was certainly amused that you made sergeant!’

‘Yeah, well I wasn’t a natural candidate for promotion in my youth. A bit lippy, if you can believe that.’

He nodded.

‘He kept that quiet.’

‘What, about him being at school with me?’

‘No, no. Batley. Forget it. Forensics are waiting. After that, do you fancy looking at a few hours of CCTV footage? I don’t want to wait ’til Monday.’

19

‘HB,’ she said.

‘And the flake of paint?’

‘Manufacturers all use slightly different colours. Bit like a pencil fingerprint.’

‘A pencil-print?’ he suggested, trying to lighten the mood.

She didn’t laugh. He’d known Bridgette almost as long as he’d been on the Force, but had never really worked out what made her tick.

‘We don’t have a database on pencil paint, wouldn’t you know,’ she said, speaking more to Rita than to Joe. ‘I mean, who uses pencils these days?’

Joe thought about the mug full of pens and pencils on his desk, and the time it always took him to find sharpeners and rubbers.

‘Fortunately,’ she added, ‘there was enough for the spectrometer, so we got an exact colour profile.’

She took a single sheet of printed paper and handed it to him.

‘It’s a slightly unusual shade of green. I’ve checked all the manufacturers I could find. A list of all the companies that paint their HB pencils in this colour.’

He took the paper from her. There were three words printed on it, right in the centre in a tiny font. Bridgette’s idea of a joke.

‘Gaia Office Supplies,’ he read out. ‘Do we know them?’

She clicked to something more interesting on her computer.

‘Not personally, but I believe there’s a new computer thing called Goggle or something. It’s magic. You just type in whatever you want to know and it tells you. It’s like the Deltic Oracles! I bet Gaia Office Supplies have one of those internet page thingies. They’re all the rage.’

He watched as she returned to her screen and scrolled down. She’d already lost interest. Forensic scientists never seemed to be very enthusiastic about their work. Yet for him this new information sent a rush of excitement through his body. A single flake of paint extracted from deep within the brain of a dead victim? Never mind the bloody internet, this was the magic.