‘Have you found him?’

‘No. The GPS trace on Sam’s phone shows it’s here, somewhere in the CID building, and has been for half an hour. There were only a couple of guest passes granted today, officers from Essex, and they are now down in reception. The cell site analysis confirms what the Find My Phone app is telling us. The GPS resolution is about five metres, so whoever’s got it should be visible.’

‘Sorry, I’m not getting this,’ Gillard said. ‘You’re saying the phone has walked itself into the building on its own?’

‘Well, obviously not. But we’ve had another text message since it got in. “Catch me if you can”. He’s obviously taunting us.’

‘We know these messages can be sent in advance, and this guy is capable of organising it,’ Gillard said. ‘But someone, possibly unwittingly, has brought the phone in.’

‘Everyone is being escorted out of the building in rotation so they can isolate who it is. It’s massively disruptive. All the incident rooms are going to have to be searched.’

‘Don’t you see, Claire? This is another subterfuge. This is our perpetrator telling us he can run rings around us. And while Surrey Police is busy examining its own orifice, he’s probably doing something else, somewhere else.’

All he could think of was Sam. Hostage somewhere. Dead or alive. Under the bridge with the fishes.

Detective Constable Carl Hoskins lifted his legs and rotated in his chair. His jaundiced eyes took in the major incident room, the central hub of this ever-broadening murder inquiry. First into Beatrice Ulbricht, then Jane Morris, and now the abduction of Samantha Gillard.

‘I don’t get this,’ he said to Rob Townsend, the only other person remaining. ‘There’s no one been in this room today that doesn’t come in here every day. There’s me, Perry, Mulholland, Michelle Tsu and you,’ he said.

Townsend, arms folded behind his head, scowled at the screen. The GPS map of the movements of Sam’s phone showed it in Sandy Lane at 9.34 a.m. and inside the building within half an hour. ‘Yet it says it’s definitely either here or in the corridor, or maybe upstairs in the storeroom, and it’s not moving anymore. It can’t be downstairs because apart from reception there’s only that big meeting room, and it’s been locked all day.’

‘But what gets me is who brought the fucking thing in?’ Hoskins said. ‘Find the person, find the phone. I mean, any of us would notice the weight of a phone if someone slipped one into our pocket, wouldn’t we?’

Townsend nodded. He’d already been through his own briefcase, and the drawers on his desk. Several of the drawers were locked, belonging to officers who weren’t on shift, but by the same token no one could have put a phone in them.

One thing that they were all grateful for was that it was a Saturday. Alison Rigby wasn’t in to witness the perpetrator making a fool of the entire force. If they weren’t able to crack this quickly, the chief constable would inevitably hear about it and would begin banging heads together.