‘Oh!’ she yelped. ‘I didn’t hear you.’

‘Sorry. I did ring the bell, and one of the builders showed me where you were. This must have been a nice garden at one time.’ The young detective gazed over the patchy lawn to the apple trees and dilapidated shed at the far end. The garden was roughly square, and probably a quarter of an acre in extent.

‘Yes,’ said Thea. ‘And will be again, I expect.’

‘If you say so.’

‘Do you want coffee? We can probably get into a corner of the kitchen to boil water. They’re doing wall cupboards and tiling today.’

Barkley nodded carelessly. ‘I’ll wait for you in the front room, shall I? I can’t stop long.’

Thea had the coffee made in four minutes, and Caz launched directly into business. ‘We can’t find any trace of your woman. She didn’t land at Manchester Airport on Saturday morning, or any time on the two days before that. She must have told you a pack of lies from start to finish.’

‘She didn’t actually say it was the airport. She hardly said anything about what she was doing there, or how she got there. Maybe that was where she lived. Or maybe she got there on a train – or a ferry. Do ferries arrive in Manchester?’

‘No. Liverpool.’

‘Well, that’s not far away, is it?’

Barkley sighed. ‘It’s too vague. We have no idea where she was this time last week. It could be anywhere in the world. There’s no way we can start searching every database and camera for her.’218

‘Didn’t the pathologist find anything useful? Vaccinations? What about labels on her clothes?’ She was ransacking her memory for details of forensic examinations she’d read about in Jeffery Deaver books and others. ‘Exotic seeds lodged in her gut?’

This time Barkley lost patience. ‘Stop it,’ she ordered. ‘We don’t have the manpower, right? She died of strangulation. The person who did it seemed to know exactly how to kill someone quickly. I had a quick read up on it last night,’ she admitted. ‘Did you know it can take less than twenty seconds for the victim to lose consciousness, if the jugular is constricted?’

‘I did not,’ said Thea, fingering her own neck. ‘I suppose that’s actually quite a long time to keep a tight grip on somebody.’

‘Not really.’ They fell silent for a moment, trying to imagine the whole process.

‘Anyway,’ Caz went on, with a little shake. ‘The killer – or killers − had to have been lurking around here on Sunday, waiting for you to leave the house, even though that’s difficult to believe. Had you told anybody you were going out? Did you phone anyone? Despite what people think, it’s fantastically unusual for baddies to hide in the undergrowth waiting for their chance to kill somebody.’

‘I know,’ said Thea. ‘I’ve spent my life telling people that. But these days, they can keep an eye on people electronically. I mean, with secret cameras and that sort of thing. They might even have planted some sort of tracker on Grace.’ She was well aware that she was 219quoting Clovis, and equally aware that she had never entirely believed what he’d said.