‘Right, so, we’re being assisted by the Garda Missing Persons Bureau in compiling these names. The guys over there are terrific. It’s unbelievable the volume of cases they deal with. In 2011 alone, they compiled over eight thousand files. By the end of the year, they had it down to twenty-three outstanding cases. Most files close themselves – the report was a mistake, somebody returned home, that kind of thing. Sometimes, the missing person was in an accident. And then there are the suicides.’

She paused. They all knew the statistics for suicide in Ireland were amongst the highest in Europe.

‘Since the Bureau was founded, back in the early eighties, it’s built up an open caseload of over fifteen hundred missing persons. They’re the people who never came home, or whose bodies weren’t discovered. In the last few years, a fair proportion of that number is speculated to be young migrant women and children sold to sex traffickers.’

Out of the corner of his eye, Tom could see Natasha McCarthy nodding. She was familiar with the facts and figures.

‘Myself and DS Geoghegan worked with the Bureau to narrow down the number of missing adult females reported over the last ten years aged forty and under at the time of their disappearance, whose cases were never solved. We cast the net as wide as a decade in case the perpetrator kept some of his victims for lengthy periods before he killed them. We’re working on the assumption that they’re all relatively young, based on the pathologist’s advice so far, but forty seemed like a good starting point.’

She turned to the board.

‘This is what we’re left with. Eighty women between the ages of seventeen and forty, missing since 2002, who never turned up again. These are the high-profile cases, but we’re running a secondary list. Fiona Holland is the most recent name. The name before hers is one we’re familiar with – Una Dolan.

‘There are a few on the list that we think we can rule out, for example, women with a history of depression or suicidal tendencies. One woman, Pauline O’Hara, was apparently in an abusive relationship. It was her partner who reported her missing, not her family, who were satisfied she’d left him and was safe somewhere. Even leaving those examples aside, we’re still left with a lot of names and we only have five bodies. Also, these are all white females, on the basis of what Moya Chambers has advised. If it turns out one of the victims is of a different race, that number will increase.’

Tom scanned the list. Some of the names were familiar and he could recall their faces and those of their worried relatives at the missing persons press conferences. Women who’d just vanished with no warning, no signs that anything was amiss.