That was clearly the wrong thing to say. The woman’s reply caused Babbage to remove the receiver a couple of inches from his ear. ‘Ah, I’m afraid the control room didn’t pass that element of it across to me. Yes, I see what you mean now. And your name is? I’m sorry, I know you told them, but they didn’t tell…’ He wrote down what she said. ‘And how many years ago was that?’

Cottesloe could see a certain element of contrition in the way that Babbage was now speaking to her. The constable decided to retreat to a bench, where there was a copy of the Sun beckoning. He hadn’t even reached a juicy story before Babbage had ended the call.

‘What was all that about?’ Cottesloe asked.

Babbage blew a sigh. ‘Some poor old dear has had what she considers a threatening letter. Naturally, it’s unsigned. Her son went missing back in the 1980s, never been found, and she thinks it’s relevant to that, because of the impending release of Neville Rollason.’

Cottesloe shook his head. ‘Everyone’s got an opinion on him.’

‘You couldn’t print mine, even in there,’ Babbage said, indicating the tabloid newspaper in Cottesloe’s hands. ‘Life should mean life.’

‘What did the letter say?’

‘All it said is—’ Babbage held out both his arms and bugged out his eyes—‘“Are you afraid of the Bogeyman?”’

Cottesloe rolled his eyes. ‘For God’s sake, is that all? It could be anyone.’

‘I said I’d follow it up,’ Babbage said. ‘Like we need another wild goose chase, given the body found in our patch.’ He mimed screwing up the report just written and chucking it over his shoulder. They both laughed.

Rainy Macintosh sat in the cramped lounge of her one-bedroomed flat in Reading, her laptop balanced on her knees, and a cup of coffee getting cold on the end table next to her. It was eight p.m. and she was frustrated. Her fourteen-year-old son Ewan was upstairs in his bedroom playing computer games. She wasn’t entirely convinced by his claim that his homework was finished, but she had too much of her own to start policing him. She’d been working away all evening on Gillard’s project, trying to figure out the types of industrial machinery that could cause compression asphyxia. She would have preferred to work on finding the culprit, the ‘who’, rather than embark on this wild goose chase about ‘how’. Her boss was convinced that cracking the second would lead to a breakthrough on the first. She wasn’t so sure.