The second building was something like a low-rise office block made from pebble-dashed concrete. It looked very modern compared to everything else, but no less bleak. Lucy didn’t pay it much attention, because the main building – the care home itself – was just ahead. Its frontage had been impressive enough, but she could now see that it went back a significant way, a hundred yards or more, and was a huge, dense block of a structure, which, for all its cornicing and traceried stone, must have been a gloomy and austere place to spend your formative years.

Directly in front of her now, the stripe of light lay across the drive from the passage entrance. She slowed, treading as lightly as possible. When she reached the corner, she halted and peeked around it.

The passage was wider than she’d expected. It was more an alley, wide enough to take a vehicle. Where it eventually led, presumably the rear of the property, was hidden in darkness. But about thirty yards along, on the wall of the care home itself, stood a pair of double-doors made from timber, with frosted glass panels in their upper sections. A garage, by the looks of it. The doors stood open about half a yard, and yellow light spilled out.

Lucy walked down there, slowly, tentatively. When she reached the door, she flattened herself against the wall and listened. Still nothing, though she was certain someone was here. She’d seen this light be switched on. More to the point, the garage doors had been forced open, the area around the central lock having splintered outward.

Surely Tessa Payne hadn’t done that?

Lucy sidled forward and glanced inside, seeing a large space where several vehicles could have been installed. Its floor was asphalt, its walls and pillars concrete, its ceiling made from wood, but none of the usual accoutrements of a garage were on show. There were no tools, no spare tyres, no shelves loaded with oily, grubby equipment. There was a vehicle, though. Only one, but it told its own story – because it was a green transit van.

Lucy slid inside so that she could look more closely. It was a nondescript vehicle, bearing no distinguishing features. But she was in no doubt that if she picked up a stone and scraped its flank, she’d expose evidence of earlier spray-jobs: blue beneath the green most likely, and beneath that black. She circled it, trying its rear doors, but they were locked. She tried the driver’s door and then the passenger door, but they were locked too. On the other side of the van, a portable electric light hung from a hook on a pillar, fed by an insulated cable, which snaked across the floor and vanished through an internal door standing open a couple of inches.

Lucy moved to this second door and listened. Again, silence.