She had not given him the brush-off that night of the Robbery Squad party. At least, she hadn’t intended to. She’d merely tried to imply to him that this wasn’t a straightforward thing for her, and that she didn’t want to blunder into an ill-advised relationship. And he hadn’t shown any indication at the time that he’d taken it personally. He’d appeared to understand what she was saying. But, whereas beforehand she’d found herself running into him at almost every corner of the nick, now, only a few days later, she rarely saw him at all.

It was entirely possible, she supposed, as she approached the Robbery Squad office door, that she wouldn’t see him now either. Most likely he’d be out and about.

But he wasn’t.

When she walked in, there were only four Squad personnel present, but Tucker was one of them. He was slumped at his desk, hammering at his keyboard, with his mobile lodged under his ear. On one hand Lucy was glad to see him, but on the other she felt mildly nervous – which annoyed her no end.

‘Bloody schoolgirl,’ she muttered to herself.

Tucker now caught sight of her and raised a friendly finger.

As she made her way over there, he pointed at the phone and signalled that he wouldn’t keep her long. He behaved as genially as ever, but she still couldn’t help thinking that there’d been a slight change in his demeanour? Was there something behind his eyes, now? A distance perhaps, which hadn’t been there previously?

She tried to put this from her mind while she waited, looking around the office and seeing that the corner formerly dedicated to the Saturday Street Gang had now been commandeered by Operation Golden Roost, named after Andy Northwood’s premises.

It was adorned wall-to-wall with the usual crime scene photos, mugshots and rap sheets for suspects, maps of the house, grounds and surrounding roads, and pages of handwritten notes, many of which looked to have been scribbled out on the hoof. All of these disparate items were now connected to each other by a complex web of differently hued cotton threads.

It seemed like an old-fashioned way of doing it, but that was the Robbery Squad all over, and at least part of its appeal to Lucy.

But perhaps the most interesting aspect of the miniature incident room was its centrepiece, a whiteboard on which three blown-up e-fits had been grouped together in an inverted triangle. The top two images depicted faces enclosed by red ski masks, with only the eyes visible. There were notations on both: body shapes, estimated height and weight statistics, guestimates about age, and the like.

It seemed vague, but the bottom image was perhaps the vaguest of all; little more than the outline of a head, with no mask, no face, and only a large red question mark in the middle.