But the Corsa stood empty and locked.

She walked around it a couple of times, bewildered, before turning to appraise the gates.

Whatever colour they had once been was now undetectable as they were so caked in rust, but as she’d seen before, they were open. A single chain, equally rusty, had once been used to bind them closed, but this hung loose. Lucy lifted it and saw that it had been snipped through, literally sliced, as though with a pair of bolt-croppers. She examined it, only to jump and look sharply around at the sound of skittering undergrowth, as if someone or something had just darted away through the foliage. But there was no visible sign of anything, the leaves and branches hanging still in the glare of her headlights.

She glanced at her own car, and the outline of Sister Cassie behind the windscreen, and then at the chain again. It was difficult to tell whether it had been cut recently, but it was clearly deliberate. The question then was: had whoever’d arrived in the police Corsa done this? If they had, it was drastic action on their part, which made it feel unlikely. Especially as they clearly hadn’t come team-handed – there were no spare bodies mooching about, there was no one standing guard on the vehicle, there was no sign at all that this was part of an organised raid.

She pushed at the gate on her right, and it swung back easily; there was no creak or groan from its hinges, suggesting that they’d been oiled recently.

She walked back to the Jimny, opened her driver’s door and, rooting in the glove-box, took out her Maglite.

‘What’s happening?’ Sister Cassie asked.

‘I wish I knew,’ Lucy replied.

She walked back to the Corsa, switching the light on and shining its beam through the various windows as she circled it again. Almost immediately, she spotted a heap of paperwork spilled across the back seat. The majority of it looked like print-out images.

Lucy leaned right to the glass, cupping her eyes to see more clearly.

They were print-out images, black and whites depicting what appeared to be vehicles at road-junctions or speeding along highways.

Print-outs from traffic camera footage, she realised.

‘Oh, crap!’ She strained her eyes to see better. And no ordinary vehicles, by the looks of the few pictures she could actually focus on. Just one vehicle in each case. A dark-coloured van. She backed away, shaking her head. ‘Tessa … what the hell are you playing at?’

Lucy hurried back to her Jimny and stuck her head through the driver’s door. ‘How far is it from here?’ she asked. ‘The main building?’

The ex-nun shrugged. ‘We’re almost there. Probably just round the next bend.’

‘Okay. In that case, I don’t want to bring the car any closer.’