It was breakfast time on Saturday morning when Gillard got a call at home from DCI Sarah Bracewell of the anti-corruption unit.

‘Sorry to disturb your breakfast,’ she said. ‘I’ve got some information that you might find useful in the hunt for the killer of Neville Rollason.’

‘That would be much appreciated.’

‘I’ve been interviewing PC Andrew Wickens, who as you know is being investigated for feeding information to the vigilante group AVENGE. For the first two days he refused to say a thing, so I set in motion a rolling series of interviews with the minimum rest period between, and just hoped to grind him down. I’m aware that we need a quick result here. We finally broke him just before dawn this morning.’

Gillard had occasionally deployed intensive interviewing practices and witnessed how gruelling it was to face the same questions again and again. The best results were often gained by going back right to the beginning each time, even down to getting the interviewee to spell his name and address each and every time. He wasn’t surprised that it was in the small hours that Wickens’ resolution had finally collapsed.

‘He confessed to attempting to gain information on behalf of AVENGE, which dovetails with what we discovered from Nigel Chivers and Terry Dalton. He also admitted that he’d logged onto the Police National Computer using a colleague’s ID.’

‘Ah, that would be PC Jim Cottesloe.’

‘Yes. The final nugget was that he finally coughed up who the mister big behind this abduction attempt was. A man named Gus van Steenis.’

‘That makes sense,’ Gillard said. ‘We’ve been sniffing around Holdersham Hall and Estate on a number of occasions related to the murder of Dr Wei-Ling Chen.’ He thanked Bracewell, finished the call and abandoned the rest of his breakfast. It was time to make another visit to the Zimbabwean.

Within an hour, three patrol cars were screaming their way to Holdersham Hall. Gillard himself hung back, driving more slowly, on the hands-free phone to the duty magistrate who was to issue the search warrant. The female stipendiary seemed to want to ask a lot of lengthy but not unreasonable questions before granting Surrey police the full range of rights they were seeking. Gillard hung on the line, even as he could see on his mobile text messages from uniforms who had come to a screeching halt outside the stately home’s main gates. It was another fifteen minutes before permission was granted, but even as Gillard relayed to the officers on the scene that they could now effect an entry, he was aware that any element of surprise would probably have been lost.

Gillard finally arrived at Holdersham Hall, to find only a rather disconsolate Rainy Macintosh standing at the entrance to the main building, while officers ferried out plastic bags containing computer equipment.