‘Any sign of the purse?’

‘No sir,’ Hoskins said, pinning up another photo. ‘According to her PA, Mrs Roy’s purse was a Bottega Veneta designer job, in light blue calf leather. Worth a few hundred quid on its own. We’ve notified the twelve banks whose credit or cash cards she owned, but it’s too early for detail on whether any have been used.’

‘I’ll get Shireen to take over that side, Carl,’ Gillard said. ‘Claire, how’s the appeal for witnesses going?’

Claire Mulholland went to a flipchart where she’d already listed a number of names. ‘We had half a dozen cyclists come forward, none of whom claim to have been on the common that early on the Sunday. Three were on the A243 at roughly 7.30 a.m., their normal run out of Epsom, but claimed not to have seen anybody cycling in either direction at that time. We’ve got two dozen lots of dashcam footage from cars on the same road, which is currently being examined. That may take a day or two.’

‘What about the CCTV from Ashtead Station?’

‘Nothing. Of course there were two other routes in from the south.’ She flipped over the first page of notes. ‘Our observant CSI trainee witness has already helped us greatly on vehicles parked to the south of the common. A green Jeep Cherokee she saw turns out to be Mrs Roy’s own vehicle. Of course it may be that any relevant vehicle for the assailant was parked much further away, along either of these residential roads,’ she said, pointing to the large map of the area now pinned to the wall.

Gillard thanked her, and then began his own contribution, describing his visit to Mrs Roy’s home, and encounters with her three children. ‘They’d already got their own version of events before Gabby managed to contact them. Mrs Roy’s phone had been ringing almost continuously at the scene, and one of the uniforms answered it. The bad news got passed on in rather an uncontrolled fashion.’

Gillard was interrupted by a uniformed constable coming into the Khazi. ‘We found the murder weapon, sir.’

‘What is it?’

‘It’s a gym hand weight. With two screw-on weights attached at one end. Quite nasty if you ask me. It had been lobbed into a patch of nettles about 150 yards from the location of the body.’

The DCI left the meeting to go and inspect. A police photographer was busy at the scene of the find. The silvery weight was 10 inches long and should have been easy to spot. There was a gory black mess caked all over the business end of the weapon. It was twenty-four hours after the murder and this patch of woods had been gone over three times. ‘All right,’ Gillard told the assembled officers. ‘Let’s not disclose details of the murder weapon. If we get false confessions, it should allow us to sift them out.’

Chapter 4

Gillard headed off to Kensington in West London to get an early interview with Kiara Roy, the youngest of the family at thirty-one, and seemingly the last to see her mother alive. While he was on the train he had looked up the Kiara Fashions website. He had to admit he hadn’t the first idea about fashion, and some of the dress designs confirmed just that. He couldn’t for the life of him see why any woman would wear what seemed to be a pair of diaphanous curtains slung with chainmail, but there on a Milan catwalk was a model wearing just that.