Barkley flipped open her standard-issue notepad and dug a pen from a pocket. ‘Go on, then.’ There was a faint hint of excitement in her voice.

‘He was walking towards me on Saturday afternoon, just about level with the big house at the business park. He’s got a nice Labrador bitch called Jess, who isn’t loved half as much as she should be. He’s a boot-faced boring accountant called James Williams. He lives somewhere hereabouts. He told me the whole village was talking about me and they think I’m a highly suspicious character.’

‘And you forgot to mention him? Sounds as if you know practically his whole life history.’

‘I met him again yesterday, with my sister. He gave me his card.’ She took it from the side table where she’d placed it the previous day. ‘He seems to think he might be questioned by the police, when I tell you he was out there on Saturday.’ She felt proud of her efforts, but Barkley looked doubtful.

‘You think he might have seen something?’

‘It’s possible, isn’t it?’

‘Not possible enough to justify questioning him. The timing’s not right, is it? We already know the woman was hiding in the bushes when you were on your walk.’

‘But he might have seen her coming from another direction – or somebody chasing her. She could have only been there for ten minutes, and not all day as she told me.’224

‘Too many variables,’ Caz asserted firmly. ‘We need to focus on her identity. You noticed, of course, that she wasn’t wearing a wedding ring?’

‘I did, actually. And she never said anything about a husband.’

‘Well, she did have a ring after all, on a string round her neck. Eighteen-carat gold, beautifully made. With initials engraved inside. English characters, not Chinese.’

‘Please tell me there’s a G.’

Barkley smiled. ‘There’s a G.’ She glanced at her notepad. ‘It’s G. B. and K. A. W. Look.’ She showed Thea the exact rendering. ‘And do not suggest we look through every marriage record for the past thirty years involving a half-Chinese bride with the initials G. B. Even with the search engines we’ve got now, that would take weeks.’

‘I don’t think marriage certificates record people’s ethnicity anyway,’ said Thea. She had a thought. ‘Did the pathologist say whether she’d ever had children?’

‘He says she didn’t. Not normally, and not by C-section.’

‘Oh.’

‘And before you ask, there are no missing persons reports that come remotely close, either. It’s all one big blank, unless we call in every cop, every minute of CCTV and some impossibly brilliant forensic team – and even then, we might not find her. If everything she told you was a lie, then there’s virtually nothing to go on.’

‘There has to be something,’ Thea insisted. ‘We can’t just let it go. What’ll happen to her body? What would 225have happened if I hadn’t found her on Saturday?’ This was a new thought, bringing disagreeable implications. ‘Maybe she would still be alive. She might have walked along that awful jungly path to Bibury, in the dark, and stowed away on one of those tourist coaches and got clean away.’