But she could not escape the feeling that she was simply putting off a much more serious and potentially unpleasant activity, and should give the laptop a miss. Her usual motto of Make something happen had let her down over the past few days. Wandering at random around Barnsley and Bibury did not constitute proactively searching for clues as to who murdered Grace. Even though she had gone over the same footpaths, and explored a suspicious-looking abandoned barn, she had not behaved remotely like a keen amateur detective looking for clues − for the perfectly good reason that there simply were no clues. The police must surely have crawled all over the business park by now, checked every scrap of CCTV footage, asked a thousand questions, and apparently come up with nothing. And that meant Grace must have lied in almost everything she’d told Thea. In the face of implacable lying, most people were helpless. The rules of ordinary communication were so comprehensively broken that you had nowhere to stand. Her name wasn’t Grace. She wasn’t Chinese. She hadn’t been forcibly driven to Barnsley. But she had been killed. Where the story would have made more sense if she had merely died of natural causes – heart failure for preference – the fact of a deliberate murder intensified 251every crucial second of Thea’s encounter with her. There absolutely had to be a clue there somewhere. And did the police not realise that? Were they just waiting for some tiny forgotten word or look to surface, which would then give them the thread they needed to follow? If so, Thea should be persistently hypnotising herself into total recollection – and with every passing day that was going to be more difficult.

On top of all that, Clovis Biddulph could not be ignored. Here was a man who wanted to participate in the search for answers, and seemed to have the time and the brains to make a decent job of it. Seemed, however, was the operative word. Could it all be one great bluff, designed to weaken her defences and allow him to get closer to her? Surely not. Hadn’t they emerged on a calmer and more adult footing now? Respect and consideration for Drew had become the driving force, and very little harm had been done. Or so she hoped. Hoping and believing might not be enough to protect her now, if Clovis had ulterior intentions. He had delicately left the next move up to her, and three times that Thursday morning her thumb had hovered over the little numbers that would bring his voice into her ear.

The only person left was Caz Barkley, forgetting the impossibly preoccupied Gladwin. And even Caz should not be called without some seriously good reason for doing so. Only if she, Thea, had a brilliant idea, or walked into a thrilling new piece of evidence, could such an interruption be justified. This latter notion took root, suggesting that there could well yet be something to 252discover at the business park, especially if she approached it from the official direction, instead of staring over hedges at the back.