Morgan nodded in agreement. ‘I’ve just spoken to Verity Winter, one of the probation officers, on exactly the same point. She told me that PC Andrew Wickens was sniffing around in their office just a few days ago without a reasonable excuse.’

‘Wickens! I saw him mooching about here just a few days ago. He’d been upstairs, presumably to this office, looking for you.’

‘I know he’s interested in the Rollason case, because he made an attempt to talk to me about it in the refectory. But he’s not alone. I set a flag on Rollason’s PNC file so that I would get notified every time an officer accessed it. There’s nearly 1,000 hits across the country in the last two weeks, including Cottesloe, Wickens’ shift partner.’

‘That flag was a good precaution,’ Gillard said. ‘I know Cottesloe. He is reliable and honest. I would trust that he had a good reason for looking. What I’d be looking for are any vulnerabilities in how we hold the data. I could get our chief geek Rob Townsend to have a look.’

Morgan, used to running his own fiefdom for many years, bridled at the suggestion. ‘Well, the SB office is as rock-solid as I can make it. There’s a tamper-proof log-in and the filing cabinets have dial locks that even I find a pain in the arse. We shred everything from the bins once a week before we put them out. I don’t know what more we can do.’ He sounded thoroughly defensive.

‘What about in the probation office?’

‘It should be fine. I audited their case management system before setting this up and decided to keep all critical details back from it. All the documents that identify Rollason or the address he was going to are solely on paper, and kept in the safe at Swan House, just to make things simple.’

‘Who has access?’

‘Jill Allsop as manager, and whoever is the duty officer. The safe logs entry. Allsop tells me there have been no unexpected accesses.’

‘Which officer was in charge of resettling Rollason?’ Gillard asked.

‘Leticia Mountjoy. It was a bit of a surprise to me, actually, because she’s relatively junior.’

Gillard rubbed his chin. ‘Okay, let’s split the work this way. You crank up an investigation on the quiet into Wickens, and I’ll speak to Ms Mountjoy.’

As Gillard returned to his office on the ground floor, he couldn’t help but think about the connection between a splash in the Thames, a man with the life squashed out of him and a missing serial killer. Leticia Mountjoy was cropping up in a few too many places.