‘Should we care?’ Richards asked. There were some uneasy looks around the table. The psychiatrist, Golob, shook his head in mute disagreement.

Morgan ignored Richards’ comment: ‘As you know, the nature of his crimes was quite extreme, but the quid pro quo for his co-operation in recovering some of the bodies is that he will be put in a place of safety. He was ghosted into a category D prison for the last month of his sentence, under a pseudonym, with a fictitious criminal record to match.’

‘What’s the new name?’ Jill asked, pen poised over her notes.

‘I’m afraid I can’t share that in an open meeting.’ His eyes flitted from face to face around the table.

‘Which prison is he in now?’

‘That’s confidential too. We can’t take any chances.’

‘All right, we’ll see who needs to know,’ Jill said. ‘Carry on.’

‘We have learned that it is often prison officers who tip off inmates about a particularly unpopular offender within their ranks. Having him living under the false record in the last few weeks of incarceration protects against that.’

‘Won’t he be recognised?’ Leticia asked. Rollason had been sentenced before she was born, but in the recent news coverage about his impending release there were numerous versions of the original scowling dark-eyed mugshots, with his thick quiff of greasy black hair and satanic eyebrows.

Morgan smiled. ‘We are hoping not. All the photographs in circulation are of him in his late twenties. He is now sixty-three, has lost most of his hair and what remains is white. At our suggestion he has trimmed and bleached his eyebrows. He now has as forgettable a face as you will ever see. Since an attack by his cellmate in 1994, he’s had false teeth too, and some further dental work recently. Given the amount of time he spent in segregation, we’re pretty confident no one in this neck of the woods will recognise him.’

‘He had a lot of tattoos,’ Verity said.

‘Well remembered,’ Morgan said, his eyes lingering appreciatively on her face. ‘He’s had them removed entirely, painfully, by laser. It was part of the deal.’

Richards shook his head, his thick grey moustache bristling. ‘Personally, I’m not entirely happy about the public purse funding this kind of thing.’ He was a bear of a man, a former prison officer in his fifties who had brought with him some of the old-school thinking that was now decidedly out of fashion in the probation system.