The gate officer handed him back his phone and he switched it on, running back from the prison to his car in the rain. It rang immediately. Not the answering service with a message from Connie, but Vera. He thought either she’d been phoning him every five minutes or she had an instinct for how long these prison visits took. It occurred to him in a moment of whimsy that she could have a sort of telepathic link to him, but that idea was so scary that he forced it out of his head.

‘How did it go?’ Her voice was cheerful, but he wasn’t deceived. She was crap at delegating. It would have been a nightmare for her to be sitting in the office while he was doing the real work.

He sat in the car with the rain battering the roof and she made him take her through the entire interview almost word for word.

‘Good,’ she said in the end. ‘In fact, bloody brilliant. I could have talked to her, but I knew what I was looking for and I’d have asked leading questions. She was always going to be a suggestible witness.’

He knew better than to ask what was so significant. Vera would tell him without the question, if she’d wanted him to know. ‘Any news on Connie?’

‘Not exactly.’

‘What do you mean?’ Ashworth demanded. ‘Where is she?’

‘Oh, I don’t know that.’ She sounded impatient. ‘But I have some ideas about who might be hiding her.’ This was Vera at her most infuriating.

‘What do you want me to do now?’

‘Come back to the Tyne valley,’ she said. ‘I’m on my way there now.’

They sat in the lounge at the Willows looking out at the river. It had spilled over its banks and the raised driveway into the hotel was like a drawbridge over a moat, the only way in. A pile of sandbags stood in the car park. Ryan Taylor met Ashworth in reception and pointed him to the lounge where Vera was waiting. He said there’d been a flood alert. If it continued raining that night, the whole valley would be under water. There was a big tide forecast and that always made things worse, even this far inland. The hotel was on high enough land to be safe, but the last thing they wanted was guests stranded or health-club members not able to get in, so he planned to build a wall of sandbags by the side of the drive.