Gillard looked over his shoulder where Perry was no longer visible. ‘I’m sure he wouldn’t want to have heard that either.’

‘The guy was a machine,’ Townsend said softly, with a hint of admiration.

Gillard retorted: ‘Well before you start getting envious, young man, let’s recall that he was a multiple murderer, a kidnapper and rapist.’ He turned his focus to the laptop. ‘What have you got for the date that Beatrice Ulbricht died?’

‘Ah yes, we’ve got something on this.’ Townsend moved the cursor across to Angie Wright’s column, and a large comment box opened up for the day in question. ‘“Argument with AW”, which I assume is Angie Wright. “Arranged to meet call girl at Excelsior. No show. Driving back saw enticing girl in hat at bus stop. Offered her a lift. Quite a bit of resistance, bitch squirted pepper spray. Lost my temper and squeezed too hard, so sadly she’s got to join Mum”.’

‘In the freezer,’ muttered Gillard.

‘There’s something else that I wouldnae let John know,’ Rainy said. ‘There’s a so-called termination date for Vanessa on the spreadsheet. It was to be tomorrow.’

Rainy Macintosh eventually tracked Perry down in the canteen to apologise for her crass insensitivity. ‘I’m really sorry,’ she said. ‘Maybe you shouldn’t have sat in on that part of the investigation.’

The detective inspector shrugged. ‘It’s just so humiliating.’

‘Well, maybe I’ve got something to cheer you up. It looks like your hunch was correct that the murderer was related to Jane Morris. He calls her Mum in his own spreadsheet, and we now have some science to prove it. The familial DNA test you asked for came in a wee while ago. Halliday has got a forty-four per cent match to her, which is within the range of mother–son connection. We should follow it up with a mitochondrial test to be sure.’

He emitted a small smile, but the rest of his face remained dour.

‘I also looked in more detail at the register of births around the time that Jane Morris disappeared. A child was registered as Graeme Garrison in Wandsworth, parents given as Linda and Harold Garrison, six months before wee Jane vanished. That presumably was the child in the pram. Graeme left school at sixteen, and that’s the last trace of him. I think that must be when he changed his name to Gary Harrison. There is no trace of it, because as I’ve discovered you don’t have to formally notify anybody unless you do it by deed poll. I reckon he took a couple of years to shake off the family association, and then he joined the army under the same Gary Harrison name.’

Perry nodded. He’d seen close up that Halliday was a man who gave women what they wanted. Yet in the end, he took each of them for all the money that they had. He turned honest women into liars, clever women into fools, and independent women into helpless supplicants.

He went home to meet his daughter, pushing his way through a crowd of reporters that had gathered in Romney Crook now that the press blackout had been lifted. Vanessa was there with family liaison officer Gabby Underwood. She was snuggled up under a blanket on the settee, and without make-up looked lost and innocent, the little girl he always pictured in his mind. There were tears in her eyes and as he smiled at her, she put out her arms to him.