‘What are you saying?’ Richard jumped to his feet. ‘How dare you accuse our son. Have you lost your mind?’

His wife’s jaw dropped open.

Fergus stayed sitting, his face contorted with hatred.

‘That’s a disgusting thing to say,’ he growled. ‘What, just because you haven’t found her body, you think you can start throwing the blame back at her own family? That’s sick. You’re sick, Inspector.’

‘No,’ Tom said. ‘We know it was you, Fergus. You made a fatal mistake with the letter.’

‘What letter?’ Richard cried.

‘We received a note. The sender wanted us to think it was from the serial killer. It claimed he’d taken Fiona and we wouldn’t find her, so we should give up.’

‘Well, then, you know it was him,’ Caroline whispered, her voice small.

The inspector glanced at her. Richard Holland was railing against the accusations, but Caroline was hunched over on the sofa, her tiny frame huddled into itself as she tried to retreat from what Tom was saying.

She wouldn’t look at her son.

A mother always knows, Tom thought.

‘Why weren’t we told about this letter?’ Richard snapped. ‘Didn’t you think we’d a right to know?’

Tom held up his hand.

‘We receive a lot of communication in an investigation like this, Mr Holland, and most of it is from cranks. We can’t inform the family until we’re certain the contact is authentic. And we weren’t in this instance. It wasn’t signed; there was nothing in it about the other murders which would have let us know he was the real deal. For example, he could have mentioned the bracelets he’d given to his victims. That information wasn’t released to the public.’ Tom turned his attention back to the young man, who was still glaring at the inspector. ‘So, you wouldn’t have known about that, Fergus.’

‘If you hadn’t sent the letter, we might never have figured it out. But you wrote it in your own notepad and we were able to pick up the letters and numbers that had been written a few pages beforehand. It took me a while to get there. I should have figured it out the day we went to see you at the garden centre. You had Lane unloading five hundred bags of fertiliser from a delivery truck. S-P, L. 500. F dash E, R. Supplies. Five hundred bags of fertiliser.’

There was a shocked silence for a moment.

Richard broke it. ‘Now, this is just getting ridiculous. Charlie Lane worked in our garden centre. You said it yourself, he was unloading the damn things. Why couldn’t he have written those letters and numbers? If that’s even what the words are.’

Tom shook his head.