Perry looked closer, and saw that his wife’s name was on the second column, and his daughter’s on the ninth. ‘Good grief, how many women were there?’

‘Aha,’ said Rainy. ‘We are not yet sure. We have just found in here a wee set of bank cards relating to somebody called Geraint Harris, of Telford, Shropshire, someone we hadn’t heard about, who had been buying the freezers and chillers. We traced the address and rang Geraint’s wife, Sophie, who isn’t even on this sheet. She hasn’t seen her husband for more than a week. We haven’t broken the news to her yet, not until we’re absolutely sure he’s the same person. Mrs Harris may have been targeted originally because she had a significant lottery win eight years ago. She turns out not to have seen her husband for over a week. She thought he was visiting his sick sister in Colorado, where she is undergoing expensive medical treatment.’

‘That’s a lie he told to many of the women,’ Gillard said.

Rainy smiled. ‘It’s clever because it provides not only a motive for being a bottomless money pit, but it proves what a wee angel he was, looking after his sister. In fact there is no sister. The photos he used to back up this lie, of him sitting at her bedside, are actually of a paralysed woman called Valerie Turner, who lived in Nottingham but died in 2017. It’s at an early stage, but Nottinghamshire Police is already investigating whether she was defrauded of her half million accident compensation two years before her death.’

‘What a bastard,’ Perry said.

‘So Geraint Harris was in Telford? That’s where the black Range Rover is registered to,’ Townsend said.

Gillard smiled. ‘We had assumed it was a cloned plate. Still, Gary Harrison, Gabriel Hallam, Geraint Harris. There’s a certain pattern here.’

‘Until we come to Kyle Halliday,’ Rainy said. ‘He is the central pivot of the whole spiderweb of lies and fantasy, because of the property he leased from Angie Wright, which enabled the entire seduction operation. Claire Mulholland and I interviewed her again this morning. Her ladyship is being a lot more cooperative now, though she’s still defending Halliday and is reluctant to see him for the piece of scum that he was. He first leased the railway arches from her husband twelve years ago to store the big freezers in, but after a while wormed his wee way into her marriage. Her husband divorced her in 2011, and gave her the crappy end of the property portfolio. Our love rat then leased three or four additional out-of-the-way places from her, which he used mainly for sleeping with other women.’

‘I don’t know how he had the time,’ Perry said. ‘Just being in one relationship is hard enough work.’

‘The answer is that he didn’t have a job,’ Rainy said. ‘Years ago he was a telecoms engineer, repairing handsets, and later a chef at a college. He got some basic qualifications soon after leaving the army, but presumably found defrauding women was an easier life. The international telecoms consultancy is a fiction, just like the sick sister fable, and the even more preposterous story about being an undercover agent in Afghanistan, which according to the spreadsheet is one that he told your daughter.’