‘So we’re looking for somebody who moved in and out of the area in a relatively short period before the women disappeared,’ Tom said. ‘That makes your taxi driver in Glendale a real person of interest.’

‘Yep,’ Michael said. ‘Barring the fact he dropped her home and was back in the pub within fifteen minutes and stayed there for the night.’

‘How do we know he dropped her home?’ Ray asked. ‘What if he brought her somewhere?’

‘They searched his house,’ Michael responded. ‘If he brought her there, he moved her again very quickly. Where to?’

‘I want that house checked again,’ the inspector said. ‘Make sure the local guards didn’t miss a hidey-hole of sorts. It might have been a cursory search, something to appease the family. Where did the taxi driver come from and where did he go afterwards? We need all of that information.’

Michael nodded, though he didn’t relish the thought of the long haul back down to Cork.

‘Right, that’s what we have on the victims,’ Tom said. ‘And there’s a lot to follow up on. Let’s look at these reports.’

‘Pathology,’ Ray said, getting another nod from his boss. He hated being pitched into the spotlight but was getting a little better at it. Up until the last few months, that was. Now, he worried about what Laura was thinking while he was talking, whether he was spitting as he spoke, if his shirt was tucked in and lots of other entirely irrelevant things.

‘Moya has confirmed, as best she can given the decomposition of the earlier victims, that asphyxiation was the cause of each woman’s death. There are no bullet or stab wounds. Also no blunt force trauma, which poses the question of how he gets the women to go with him. The boyfriend angle is the most convincing in that scenario.’

‘Did she pick up any traces of chemicals he might have drugged them with – is that possible after time?’ Laura asked.

‘Una Dolan was the best bet for that,’ Ray answered. ‘And no. There was nothing traceable in her system. In fact, Moya says each of the women appeared to be in tiptop condition. There was no damage to the sexual organs. She didn’t find any evidence of post-mortem intercourse on Una, so if it was him who dug her up and reburied her, it wasn’t for that reason.’

Tom shook his head, both in relieved disgust and also amazement that Ray had got that bit out without gagging.

‘There was one injury on Una that you could read as being consistent with resisting the final attack. A fractured little finger. Aside from that, the bodies aren’t giving us much. Oh, one other thing: none of them were emaciated. Moya was able to check that based on the bone density. He was feeding them while they were in captivity.’