‘I don’t believe you could possibly have found all that so quickly. It’s a miracle.’

‘Not really. I checked the Oxfordshire newspapers first and there it is. A photo as well. Is this your woman?’

Thea peered excitedly at the tiny image. ‘I can’t see it properly.’ Ben expanded it for her, and she squealed with amazement. ‘That’s her! The one on the left. So she wasn’t called Grace, after all.’

‘She took the name of her partner – wife, I suppose. Probably the first thing that popped into her head.’

‘The real Grace looks nice,’ Thea said wistfully. ‘Poor woman. Presumably she’s got no idea what’s 308happened.’ She sat there, open-mouthed, trying to process this disconcerting discovery. She reviewed the brief time she’d spent with the dead woman – who she had to start calling Karen instead of Grace. She had lived only twenty miles away. She had no discernible links with any sort of trafficking. And yet – she had been deliberately killed, here in this very house. Her fear had been real and entirely justified. The dramatic story that Thea had constructed from the snippets Grace/Karen had given her suddenly felt more ordinary, but at the same time more terrible. ‘But she must have told me some lies,’ she concluded. ‘What about all that stuff about Manchester and people in a car. I believed that part of the story.’

‘We don’t know that she was lying,’ said Ben. ‘This doesn’t disprove the basic story. But it does establish an identity for her and that’s the main thing. Plus, of course, this murder victim, Ms Karen Alison Wheelwright, is almost certainly some relation to me, and my mum, even if she does look Chinese. Did you say she told you she had an English father? Then he’s got to be a Wheelwright. I wonder if I can find his first name somewhere?’

‘Oh, Ben. Stop being so calm about it. This is linking the whole business to your family, for heaven’s sake. What if … what if one of them killed her?’

He shivered, as if throwing off a dowsing of cold water. ‘It’s all speculation at the moment. We haven’t got a shred of evidence against anybody.’

‘Yet,’ she muttered darkly. The picture was still coalescing inside her head. The main obstruction was 309the inclusion of the city of Manchester – nothing she could imagine explained how that could fit.

‘We need to locate this Grace Berensen,’ Ben said. ‘In fact, we ought to let the police know what we’ve found, before we do anything else. If we don’t, they’ll have us for obstructing the course of justice. You know who to call, I assume?’

‘Normally, I’d go straight to Gladwin. She’s a detective superintendent. But she’s up to her eyes in this pangolin business, and I haven’t seen her all week. I suppose it’ll have to be Cirencester, and I don’t know them there. Not very well, anyhow.’

‘Call them,’ he said. ‘If I’ve learnt anything in the past year or two, it’s when to stop acting unilaterally and let the professionals take over.’