Holly pushed her hair away from her face and pretended not to like the attention. ‘Hannah doesn’t know anything about a recent boyfriend. She says there’ve been men in the past. One guy who worked for he National Park. According to Hannah, he was besotted, but Jenny dumped him about a year ago. Hannah was surprised; she’d thought her mother was keen too. Since then, nothing.’

‘You’ve got the name of this man?’ Vera knew Holly would have. Holly was ambitious and knew better than to leave herself open to criticism.

‘Sure. Lawrence May. Age: late forties. Divorced. No kids. They went walking and birdwatching together.’ Vera thought Hector, her father, might have known him. Hector had been keen on birds too, but best of all he’d liked killing and stuffing them. When she’d taken over his house in the hills she’d found the freezer full of corpses waiting for his attention. As a taxidermist on the shady side of legal, he’d have seen May as the enemy. A lily-livered robin-stroker without any idea of what the countryside was all about.

‘Spoken to him?’

‘Not yet.’

Of course not. She’d been too busy playing Mother Teresa with the girl.

‘Get onto it first thing tomorrow.’ Vera looked at the plate of buns and saw it was empty. Her fault. She should have known better than to leave it within reach of Charlie. ‘Did the search team turn up anything interesting from her home or her office?’

‘The team found her laptop at home,’ Holly said. ‘If she’s still in touch with Lawrence May, there should be emails. There was an electronic diary on it, but that was mostly work. IT is sorting through the rest now.’

‘We still haven’t found her handbag,’ Vera said. ‘A woman like that, surely she’d have a handbag. Probably a briefcase too. Holly, can you ask Hannah? She’d know what her mother usually carried her stuff around in.’

Holly nodded, but Vera could tell that her mind wasn’t on such mundane details. She was still thinking about bringing comfort to the girl.

‘According to her best mate, there was a new man in her life,’ Vera said. ‘A secret lover. If she’d started going out with May again, no reason surely why she’d keep it secret.’

‘Unless she just wanted to see how it worked out before going public,’ Joe Ashworth chipped in. Sometimes Vera thought he represented her feminine side. He had the empathy and she had the muscle. Well, the bulk. Muscle, she had to admit, was sorely lacking. ‘She wouldn’t want to make a fool of herself, announce they were an item again, only for it all to fall apart.’

‘The friend thought the new bloke might be married,’ Vera said. ‘Something to keep in mind. We haven’t got much else as a motive.’