He shook his head. ‘Gone. Just vanished.’

Chapter Five

Alison Rigby had pulled in Gillard every day for updates. Friday afternoon’s summons came at around four o’clock, and the detective chief inspector found himself facing his boss across her desk. She listened intently as he laid out what they had discovered, and the intention to refocus the case around the village of Westmeare where the missing woman was last seen.

‘Mr and Mrs Ulbricht arrive tonight from Berlin,’ she said. ‘They’ll be staying at the Fynton Park Hotel in Guildford until we have a conclusion in the case. I’ve promised them all reasonable access to the latest developments in the inquiry. I’m sure the minister will want to speak to you from time to time.’

‘Yes, ma’am.’ Gillard felt his throat go dry at the prospect of being so closely scrutinised in his work.

Her blue eyes locked on to him. ‘Special Branch has already begun a preliminary investigation into Beatrice’s past, and found nothing untoward. But if you have the slightest feeling that the family is connected to her disappearance, the time to tell me is now,’ she said.

‘There is nothing to indicate it, ma’am.’

‘So what’s your best guess?’ she asked.

The detective chief inspector took a deep breath. ‘She could still be alive, I suppose. Our abductor, who I have a hunch is male, is extremely well organised, well-resourced with a vehicle, forensically aware as regards mobile phone and CCTV usage, and had access to a confederate who was willing to impersonate the missing woman. The good news is that the chance of catching a criminal increases at the square of the number of people involved in the crime.’

‘So you think this was planned in advance?’

‘It has to be.’

‘But who could have predicted she would walk out from Singer’s house to that particular bus stop at that time of night?’

Gillard shrugged. ‘We only have Singer’s word for that sequence of events. We’ll get the DNA tests back from his home tomorrow morning. Then we’ll know more.’

‘I’m relying on you to crack this quickly. I don’t think I’ve ever had so many phone calls from Whitehall, offering extra officers, checking that we’ve got the latest forensic equipment, suggesting that they would fund an expanded training budget. It’s like austerity in reverse, so I’m not knocking it. Politically, of course, the Home Office is simply covering its back. They don’t want to risk me standing up and saying that we were too poorly resourced to investigate this crime properly. While it’s all very well us raking in extra cash, we need a result and we need it quickly. We are being watched.’

Dismissed, Gillard turned and retreated from his boss’s office. He certainly felt he was being watched.

DC Carrie ‘Rainy’ Macintosh had the unenviable task of assessing the helpline calls, social media postings and emails that flooded in about the case. She had a team of five, who winnowed out the cranks, the weirdos and the plainly abusive, of whom there were a lot. The fact that Beatrice Ulbricht was the daughter of a German minister seem to antagonise a small but vociferous section of the population who referenced the war, Nazis, or the World Cup final of 1966 in a variety of tasteless jokes. There were dozens of informants who suggested that the Beatrice Ulbricht imposter was actually their ex-wife, or estranged daughter, or in one case, dead daughter. Chasing up anything plausible was extremely time-consuming, particularly because only a minority of informants were willing to leave an address or phone number. After eliminating the absurd and abusive, Friday’s haul of possibles included a man in Inverness who reckoned the impostor was a girl that he taught in a music class in Edinburgh two years ago, a charity shop worker from Cheshire who recalled selling an identical hat to a young woman last Christmas, and, finally, someone who had emailed a link to one of Beatrice’s own videos, along with a short message.