‘Huh? Who is she then?’ Sam asked.

‘That’s a very good question.’

Chapter Four

Friday

‘Didn’t any of you morons check?’ Alison Rigby was roasting the entire incident room team, more than twenty people. It was 6.30 a.m. Each and every one of them had been summoned for an early meeting at Mount Browne, so that the chief constable would herself have an answer to offer the minister at the start of the German working day, which was seven a.m. British time.

‘Ma’am, with all due respect, we did check,’ Gillard said. ‘We have three pictures of Beatrice Ulbricht from her friends, one of them wearing the same distinctive hat and coat. What we don’t have, precisely because she is wearing this broad brimmed hat and had her collar turned up, are any good facial images from the CCTV to check them against.’

‘You are clearly all bewitched by the hat, coat and violin, aren’t you?’

‘Ma’am, to be fair,’ said Carrie Macintosh, ‘this person, whoever she is, has not only the clothes and the possessions, but the phone of the missing woman. It’s a very elaborate and pointless exercise, surely, to impersonate her?’

‘Elaborate, yes. Pointless, maybe not. You are supposed to be detectives,’ Rigby said, lasering the entire room with her blue stare of death. ‘And detection is built on evidence. You made assumptions, and then built on those assumptions. Surrey Police has already squandered a thousand man hours on this case. Add to that British Transport Police, the Met and God knows who else. Everyone has been deployed to crawl all over footage from the railways, footage that we now know is not of the missing girl.’

‘It will still be relevant, because—’ Macintosh interjected.

‘Shut up, detective constable. The valuable first few hours and days of the hunt for a missing person have been wasted because we have been looking in the wrong place. Yes, whoever is impersonating her will be relevant eventually. But whoever did this must have intended to waste an awful lot of police time and energy and, because of your incompetence and failure to make basic checks, they have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. You should all hang your heads in shame.’

Rigby, casually dressed in sweatshirt, jeans and trainers, stalked around the room staring at each detective in turn. Very few could meet her gaze. ‘Herr Ulbricht told me that his daughter is a little shorter than this woman, and she walks in a different way. Her hands are different. The minister rang to tell me this at three o’clock this morning.’

Gillard raised his hand to speak. ‘Ma’am, we have the seat cover where the impostor sat. We haven’t done anything with it yet, because we didn’t think we needed to, but I shall get it sent off to see if we can get a DNA trace.’

‘That’s a good start,’ Rigby said. ‘The Met have interviewed her fellow quartet members, but I’m unsure whether they have seen any of the CCTV. Let’s make sure that we can get the father’s impressions corroborated.’