The next thing to look at was the car. Hampshire uniforms had recovered quite a bit of Blanchard’s luggage from the wrecked Volvo, including a work laptop. There were no details of whether it had survived being submerged in the river. However, the document trail did show the vehicle had been taken initially to a garage on the edge of Haslemere because of lack of storage space at the nearest police station. Within six weeks it had been shuttled off to a breakers’ yard on the edge of Winchester. Someone from Stella Anderson’s team had gone to find it in March, when her inquiry began, but couldn’t locate it in the enormous and chaotic yard. No doubt Aqua Western’s insurers had released the company car as scrap. It didn’t look to Gillard that she had pursued this angle very hard, but for a murder investigation being able to examine the car would have been very useful. He would like to have seen any satnav records which showed where the vehicle had been in the preceding weeks, but again he did not have access.

He sighed. This was like banging his head against a brick wall. Somewhere along the line the misper inquiry into Blanchard had become something more, judging by the involvement of someone as senior as Stella Anderson. He’d got individual records from Hampshire, but he was clearly being stonewalled on the extent of the inquiry. He emailed Radar Dobbs, and copied in Chief Constable Alison Rigby, asking them to exert pressure on Hampshire to release all relevant records. Given that this was a Friday, it would inevitably take until next week to get to the top of the chief constable’s bulging in-tray. In the meantime, he would use the weekend to start at the other end. There were two people in particular who lived in Bourne Lane, who had serious criminal records, and may have had a motive for killing Ozzy Blanchard.

One was Christopher Tickett, and the other was the Reverend Matt Cleaver.

Chapter Ten

The prison record of Christopher John Tickett stated the bald facts. Found guilty of the murder of Henry Harold Willow in November 1982 and sentenced to seventeen years, of which he served twelve. Generally good behaviour inside, much of it served in Parkhurst on the Isle of Wight. Since release, a few speeding tickets, a caution following an altercation in a pub, and interviews about fly-tipping and the theft of lead from the roof of a church.