Tom cast a backwards glance at the car park and the people still milling around. They’d all have a great story to tell about their trip to the Wicklow beauty spot today, each of them shivering and remarking with shocked awe: ‘It could have been me, I could have found her … to think, how close we were!’

‘Who’s up here?’ he asked.

‘Laura Brennan came out with me and a couple of the team are en route. She’s organising the ground search. We’ve set up a quarter-mile radius, but we’re concentrating on the main route of approach, along the path we’re taking. We’re working on the assumption that whoever brought her here used this car park. It would have been a twenty-minute hike if he’d left his car near the monastic ruins entrance. We’ve about ten uniforms assisting. We’ll need more. Moya and Emmet are taking care of the body and the scene.’

Tom felt a shiver, despite the burning afternoon sun. That was ominous. Moya Chambers was the new Deputy State Pathologist and Emmet McDonagh was the Chief Superintendent of the Technical Bureau, the Garda Síochána forensic unit. For both department heads to be at the same crime scene was unusual.

It took them about ten minutes to reach the site – a section of the wooded area below the main trail between the monastic settlement and the valley’s lower lake.

‘He wouldn’t have been able to get his car any closer to this spot,’ Tom observed, before they left the path.

‘I know. That’s why we’re walking.’

‘That’s my point. If he killed her at the site, she trusted him enough to walk along this path with him and go off the public trail. He couldn’t have forced her all this way and if he dragged her down to the wood, somebody might have spotted it. If he didn’t kill her here, he had to carry her body all the way from the car park. So, in that scenario, we’re talking about somebody fit, or two people. Could you carry a dead body this distance?’

Ray was a decent benchmark of what could or couldn’t be achieved, strength-wise.

His DS shrugged. ‘It would depend on her weight and how I was carrying her. Over my shoulder, a regular-sized woman, yeah – just about. But surely somebody would spot you lugging a body over your shoulder?’

‘Not if it was the dead of night. Is it her, do you think?’

‘Fiona Holland? I don’t know. I haven’t seen her yet. Emmet and Moya were just securing the scene and the body when we arrived.’

Neither of them said anything more. What was worse – for the missing girl to be found dead, or for her to still be missing, fate unknown, and this to be some other poor woman?