For DC Carl Hoskins, the three newly appointed female officers sitting opposite him were a distraction from a monstrous piece of work. A massive email file of 17,000 car number plate photographs from ANPR had fallen to him to check through. Every vehicle that had visited Chieveley in the two days leading up to the murder of Blanchard. What was he supposed to look for in that lot? He already knew that the white Honda that Blanchard’s body had been found in did not register on any other cameras at the services that day. Nevertheless, Gillard was convinced Blanchard was there to meet somebody, he wanted to find out which vehicle they had arrived in. But he had nothing to go on. Starting from the other end, with needles not haystacks, he looked up the vehicle registrations for all the main players in the inquiry who lived at Rissington Common. He had already eliminated the vehicles owned by the Tickett family, the registration numbers of which were already on file, and that of Matthew Cleaver. Of course the three male Ticketts themselves were in custody, and had been at the time the vehicle was found, but that didn’t mean that Blanchard hadn’t already been dead for a day or two before the car was burned. Confirmation of an early time of death might put them back in the frame.

The next step was to look for vehicles owned by any member of the Willow family. A far less common name than Cleaver or even Blanchard, he found four, all of them registered to the Anvil Arms address. Cross-referencing one of them, a red Citroën C3, showed it had been at Chieveley Services just two hours before the body had been found. Rubbing his hands together with enthusiasm, Hoskins finished off with a final flourish. It was the standard ANPR search, now automated, which allowed all registration numbers of interest, i.e. anything amongst the current caseload, to be matched up against a particular subset of cameras and a date range.

He started the program running and stood to get a coffee from the machine. The three young female officers, currently looking through CCTV from Chieveley, glanced up at him. ‘Coffee, ladies?’ Hoskins said, enjoying what for him was the rarity of female attention. The complexity of the requests, one of which involved going down to the canteen to get some soy milk, quickly brought him back to reality. ‘So one redbush tea without milk, one double espresso with Sweet and Low, a soy milk latte, and a bar of dark chocolate.’

Hoskins was back in ten minutes, and after distributing the drinks, sat down to see the results of the search. There was one there that astounded him.

Ray Slater, former brother-in-law and sometime private detective, had been parked at Chieveley for three hours, leaving at about the same time that the burning car was discovered.

That could not be a coincidence.