Gary Tilling was sitting on a sofa giving a statement to a uniformed female officer. He apparently didn’t have much to say, and kept asking if he could go and attend to his mother. The officer looked up at Gillard enquiringly. He called her over and lowered his voice so Tilling couldn’t hear.

‘What’s the mother like? How big is she?’ she asked him, indicating the upstairs room with a flick of her eyes.

‘I promise you have never seen anything like her in your life.’

Gillard started searching his phone contacts. Justice required that the woman be taken to hospital, urgently. It was the only type of custody that would be safe for her. It was beyond his experience, but he guessed he would have to involve the woman’s doctor and care providers. He would ask a family liaison officer to coordinate whatever was required. This was certainly going to be tricky. But before that, he needed to secure the scene.

‘I need to have the room searched thoroughly before we let Tilling up there. That includes the bed itself.’

‘Really?’ asked Hoskins.

‘It’s the perfect place to conceal evidence. I’ll need two female officer volunteers, but we’ll wait until we can get a neutral observer, maybe a district nurse. I’ve got a call in to social services. I just want to make sure that no evidence gets flushed down the loo, chucked out the window or smuggled out. We don’t yet have enough evidence to charge either of them with the murders, but there’s plenty for the abduction.’

There was one other person who had managed to evade arrest. Verity Winter. Where on earth was she?

Back at Mount Browne, Gillard was quickly presented with compelling evidence from Gary Tilling’s laptop of his mother’s online mukbang business.

‘It’s not for the faint-hearted,’ Townsend warned.

The production values of the YouTube video were pretty slick, the camera steady and a backdrop projected that made her look like she was in some luxury penthouse apartment, a glorious city nightscape in the background. Mrs Tilling had put on make-up, a wig and jewellery, though she was still in bed. The officers had crowded around to watch the Youtube video, but, after the product introductions had ended and the eating began, almost every detective turned away. The slurping of noodles, the juice running down her chin – it was all too much.

‘What else have we got?’ Gillard asked Townsend.

‘Some finances and bank account stuff. Gary Tilling has done a good job of deleting incriminating material. But there is this.’ The research intelligence officer brought up an early draft of the contract, drawn up by Charon Stichting, that the Taiwanese man had been offered.

‘He paid them £87,000 to be killed by “gradual and protracted intimate suffocation”,’ Townsend said. ‘The bank account details do show that it was paid.’