When Otara was ready, he called in the entire nightshift team. That included a dozen NCA plainclothes officers as well as various technical specialists who were looking at the electronic and forensic evidence. Surrey’s team included DI Claire Mulholland, plus DC Carl Hoskins, who was concentrating on the attempted murder of Gillard’s aunt, and a handful of uniformed officers. Claire looked around at all the experts and specialists, and knew that Gillard would have loved to have been there.

Otara called them to order. For a man who had been continuously on duty for thirty-six hours, he looked remarkably fresh. Clear-eyed, trimmed beard, crisply ironed shirt. It all projected competence.

‘I just want you to hear the latest, for those who have been stuck in their own silos for the last five or six hours. One, is that the women’s underwear recovered from the bus stop in Westmeare produced a DNA match with Sam Gillard. The last message to Craig Gillard, from her phone, was made from the same bus stop. So we can be sure that the messages Gillard has received on his home phone are indeed from the abductor. Two, we made very quick progress on the phone number provided by Ellen Bramley.’

‘Sorry, can you just remind me who she is?’ asked a sleepy-looking male officer.

‘She’s an old friend of Mrs Gillard, a former colleague from her days training as a PCSO, who had been dating a man called Gabriel Hallam.’ The DCS pointed to one of the whiteboards where the name had been written in marker pen at the centre of a web of arrows and question marks. ‘She got in touch with Craig Gillard when she heard on the grapevine that her friend Sam had been abducted.’

‘Oh yes, now I remember.’ Sleepy rubbed his five o’clock shadow.

Otara continued. ‘She contacted Craig yesterday evening, and following his advice surrendered her phone at Bedford Police Station, and we were immediately able to analyse it. We are now working on the assumption that Gabriel Hallam is a pseudonym, because we cannot find any banking, residential or location data for this name, apart from this one burner phone which is currently switched off.’ He looked over at the two female officers who had worked through the night to try to track down this information, and they nodded.

‘His name seems to exist only on social media,’ said one of them. ‘We believe this woman was deliberately groomed by the abductor in order to piggyback on her connection to Mrs Gillard. That’s how he found her home, and learned details about her movements and those of her husband.’

Otara turned to a male officer, DS Stephen Dodd. ‘What is the latest on the mobile ANPR trawl, Steve?’

‘We got more than a dozen hits around the bus stop at about the time the message was sent. None match any vehicles of interest, as of now. The Warrior seems to have disappeared. We’ve managed to eliminate three or four local Westmeare residents from those hits, after house-to-house visits. The best connection we have is a black Range Rover, registered to an address in Telford, Shropshire, to a Mrs Sophie Harris.’