Rob felt an unexpected pang over her description of the detective chief inspector. ‘There was plenty of cocaine found at Lal’s flat, enough to get him for dealing. But Gillard wants him for the big one, the murder.’

‘I bet he always gets his man,’ Kirsty said.

Provoked, Townsend struck back. ‘Sometimes the wrong one. He was all over the place in this case at first, because he mixed up the DNA evidence with some guy called Jason Waddington. Wasted a load of everyone’s time and kept us in the dark about it.’

Kirsty looked taken aback. ‘I thought you said he was a good boss?’

‘He is.’

‘So why are you slagging him off?’ She looked more offended about it than seemed reasonable.

‘What’s it to you, anyway?’

‘He was my knight in shining armour, remember? On my first day.’

Townsend, now thoroughly irritated, stood up to leave. ‘See you later.’

‘Rob, don’t be like that.’

‘Like what?’

‘There’s nothing to be jealous about. Sit down.’

He did so, with a certain petulance. She leaned across to him, her face close to his, and whispered, ‘It’s my birthday tomorrow. Come and stay with me tonight, then we can go away for the weekend, to my parents’ caravan in the New Forest. Switch off the phones, just have a weekend for us. How about that?’ The words were persuasive enough, but it was the stroking hand under the table on the crotch of his trousers that brooked no argument. He nodded his agreement, eking out an offended expression into apparent indifference.

She stood up to leave, stretching like a cat, while his eyes roamed over her.

‘Kirsty, that stuff I told you about the case. That’s just between us, okay?’

She giggled. ‘Cross my heart and hope to die.’

He watched her as she walked languidly away from the table. God, he was smitten.

The haul of electronic data from the Roy family and associates was keeping an entire room of specialist investigators busy. They had taken over a spare room in the forensic unit, which could house twenty people. There was quite a bit of kit in there that Gillard had never seen before, but he didn’t have the luxury of time enough to be given a tour.

‘What have you got for me, Rob?’ The detective chief inspector asked as the research intelligence officer looked over the shoulder of colleague at a screen.

Townsend looked up. ‘We found Lal’s car abandoned in a multi-storey just up the road in town.’

‘Here in Guildford?’

‘Yep. It tripped a couple of ANPR cameras and we got the exact fix from its satnav.’

‘Before you laid hands on the device?’

‘Yes. We retrieved it remotely thanks to a little tool that we borrowed from GCHQ.’

‘That’s a new one on me,’ Gillard said.

‘The chief constable intervened with a friend in Cheltenham on our behalf. I’m told we owe them a favour.’

‘And where has our suspect been?’

‘The satnav showed he passed close to Morag Fairburn’s house, stopped in an adjacent street for five minutes—’