‘He worked for a couple of years at a letting agency that specialized in local countryside properties,’ Ajay told his two colleagues. ‘Farmhouses and holiday homes.’

‘Look for addresses,’ Vaughn shouted to Craig. ‘On the computer, or written down somewhere. Addresses related to those keys and numbers.’

‘Got it.’

Vaughn turned to Ajay. ‘We need a map of everything in that area between the River Crouch and the River Roach.’ There were towns and villages, tiny hamlets, in the flat countryside north of Southend – Rochford, Hawkwell, Paglesham, Ashingdon and Canewdon among them – before the Crouch joined its tributary, the Roach, at Wallasea Island and then flowed into the North Sea. ‘I want a proper map, DS de Vaz, a big one made of paper, so we can spread it out. I really don’t want to fiddle with a laptop.’

‘What if we don’t have one?’

‘Southend Museum is next door,’ Vaughn told him.

Ajay rapped his knuckles on the interior glass window to get the attention of one of the support staff in the office, and they spoke for a moment before she rushed off.

‘Yeah, okay, we’ve got something.’ Craig said when he came back on the speaker. ‘There’s a notepad with various addresses in it, they all look like properties in the area.’

They heard him turning pages as he reeled off the addresses, which were spread out across the countryside over a radius of four or five miles.

‘Some of those are in the middle of nowhere,’ Vaughn told Ajay. ‘We’ll need GPS coordinates.’

‘There’s not a lot for me to do here now, sir. I’m in the area already, let me check some of those addresses.’

‘Thank you, DC Power, we have that covered. Continue to coordinate the search at the house.’

There was a sound on the other end of the phone that sounded like a snort of annoyance.

‘Did you say something, DC Power?’

‘Sorry, sir,’ Craig said. ‘Just dropped my pen.’

One of the MIT detectives knocked on the door and came inside. ‘Sir, you might want to come and look at this.’

They went back into the incident room where someone was pointing a remote control at a screen on the wall.

Lolly was at her desk, hunched over a pad, writing as quickly as possible, taking down everything Carrington’s estranged wife was telling her. ‘That must have been terrible,’ she said occasionally into the headset, or, ‘Poor you.’

One of the detectives rewound the footage they had seen on a news channel and turned up the volume. A shaky camera raced towards Karin McCarthy as she left her house; they saw reporters jostling her, barking questions about the abductions, heard the slap of footsteps on the pavement. Karin bolted across the street and jumped into a roadster, Sasha’s familiar Spider Veloce, which accelerated up the street, making the reporters scatter.

‘Well.’ Ajay grimaced. ‘That doesn’t look good.’