‘Around then, I suppose,’ Sam Rodwell replied. ‘Tuesday night was probably the first night we heard when it hadn’t been turned off.’

‘That’s right,’ her husband agreed. ‘We were in bed and I could hear gunfire – like movie gunfire, you know. And cowboy film music. I said to Sam, “Christ, Harry’s pulling a late one.”’

Lucy nodded, and scrawled some notes in her pocket-book, one of which was to check if there’d been a western on TV late on Tuesday night.

‘Is this going to take long?’ Sam Rodwell asked. ‘You see, we were just going to—’

‘It’ll take as long as it needs to, I’m afraid, Mrs Rodwell. We have a pensioner missing, and we’d like to get to the bottom of whatever’s happened to him. So, I’d like you both to throw your minds back to Tuesday. Not just the night, but during the daytime as well. Did anything unusual happen? Doesn’t have to be serious, but anything that seemed like a break from the norm, apart from the telly being left on?’

Their faces turned blank as they tried to think it through.

‘You didn’t hear any raised voices, perhaps?’ Lucy prompted them. ‘Any shouting or even laughing?’

They still looked blank.

‘Any vehicles coming and going? Maybe at the back of the house?’

‘Oh yes, wait …’ Sam Rodwell said. ‘There was something like that. Hell, I think this was on Tuesday night too. We heard like a screeching of tyres along the Backs.’

Lucy watched her carefully. ‘Definitely along the Backs?’

The young woman nodded. ‘Like a vehicle was tearing away, you know. It was quite unusual, because it’s very narrow back there.’

‘Yeah, I remember that now,’ her husband said. ‘Only lasted a second and then it was gone.’

‘What time would this have been?’ Lucy asked.

‘I don’t know.’ Sam thought about it again. ‘We weren’t in bed at that stage, so not too late. Half-past ten, something like that.’

‘You don’t really think something bad could have happened to Harry, do you?’ Alan asked, finally sounding concerned.

‘That, sir,’ Lucy replied, ‘is what I’m trying to discover.’

‘What do we think about the daughter?’ Stan Beardmore asked from Lucy’s laptop screen.

Lucy sat back in her office chair. ‘I think she’s genuine. She took a long time coming around to check, but she lives in Blackburn, plus she’s a radiographer at the hospital there, so she works shifts. Sounds like this morning was the first chance she had to visit.’

‘And the neighbours?’

‘There’s no one in No. 6. An old lady owns it, but she’s in long-term care. The Rodwells, the couple who reported the speeding vehicle, live at No. 10. I don’t get any particularly bad vibes about them. Typical young suburbanites. Bit self-centred maybe, but who wasn’t at that age?’