‘It’s suggesting they might be. Look … one week you’re on the prowl, looking for dogs – God alone knows for what reason – and a week later, you’ve upped your game, and you’re now looking for humans. I know it’s a massive leap. But there is a kind of pattern emerging. The missing dogs were mostly reported during early summer, May, June and July. We’ve had next to none since the beginning of August – except for Milly, Harry Hopkins’s dog, but she probably wasn’t the main target.’

‘And let me guess,’ Nehwal said, ‘it’s during August when these disappearances of homeless people seemed to start occurring.’

Lucy nodded. ‘Quite a coincidence, eh? It’s not just that, though, ma’am. It’s the similar nature of the disappearances. It’s the way the victims are there one minute and gone the next. I mean, according to reports, quite a few of these dogs were taken from their own front or back gardens. Their owners had let them out before bedtime, and left the door open, expecting them to come back in when they’d done their duty. The dogs didn’t come back in, the owners went to look – the dogs had gone without trace. From their own gardens. Isn’t that a little bit similar to Harry Hopkins?’

Neither of the two supervisors replied.

‘And it suggests planning,’ Lucy added. ‘Stan, this wasn’t just opportunism. These were incidents where someone had targeted families who owned dogs and had waited for their moment to strike. To a degree, it’s the same with these missing persons.’ She looked at Nehwal. ‘And your conviction, ma’am, that there would need to be more than one assailant ties in with this very neatly. Even if your target’s homeless, drunk, a drug-addict, whatever … you can’t just drive up to him in the street and snatch him. You have to watch him, follow him, wait till he’s most vulnerable.’

Lucy paused. Nehwal glanced at Beardmore. Neither of them seemed instantly dismissive, but she knew what they were thinking.

Why?

Grabbing a shed-load of pet dogs to use them as bait in fighting pits, while reprehensible, was at least logical. But what other reason could there be for such abductions? And why suddenly extend that to grabbing human beings? What was the pay-off in either case?

But then, second-guessing the motives of violent criminals was often a fruitless quest. In all her police career to date, Lucy had never known an investigator’s hypothesis regarding a crime be dismissed simply because the motivation behind it seemed unfathomable.

Psychopaths tended to have motivations entirely of their own.

‘You really consider this a viable lead?’ Nehwal said, watching Lucy carefully.

‘Ma’am … I’m not trying to pretend it’s anything other than a hunch at present, but the more I think about it, the more I believe it warrants further investigation.’