‘Mind if we have the weather forecast on?’ Claire said, eyeing her boss suspiciously. ‘There is supposed to be a warning over the next couple of days.’

He nodded and switched to the radio. The outlook was every bit as bad as she had predicted, with an unusually deep depression sweeping in from the Atlantic. High winds with localised flooding was inevitable, the forecaster said.

‘A bit more than April showers,’ Claire said.

‘I hope it stays dry Sunday morning,’ he said. ‘I’m teaching Sam to rock climb. She’s done indoor ascents with me a few times, but I wanted to get her used to the feel of real rocks under her fingertips.’

Saturday

Craig Gillard had rarely played the car park game, sucking up to your boss by having your vehicle seen prominently at work at some unearthly hour. But arriving at 6.15 a.m. inevitably made him look like he wanted to impress. It was almost two hours before his shift was due to start, but he wanted to get an early look at the forensic tests that had been run overnight at Mount Browne’s own lab. As he slid the Vauxhall into a nicely prominent slot near the entrance, he couldn’t help noticing the chief constable’s car was already in her reserved space.

Perhaps she’d been there overnight?

He made his way over to her vehicle, and pressed his ear to the bonnet. He heard the characteristic ticking of a cooling engine. Arrived within the last few minutes, then.

Gillard walked into reception to find the chief constable and four other people standing with mugs of coffee. He immediately recognised the sleek patrician features of Karl-Otto Ulbricht. A handsome and well-coiffed woman next to him he assumed must be Mrs Ulbricht. The other two were multi-lanyarded young men with the alert keenness of officialdom: one seemingly from the German justice ministry, the other from Whitehall.

‘Ah, Craig,’ Rigby said. ‘Just the person to guide us around the forensic centre, where I believe we are expecting results, am I right?’

Utterly blindsided by this early arrival of heavies, Gillard asked for a minute to make preparations. He walked calmly until he was through the first double doors and out of sight, and then sprinted to the forensic centre. It took him three hasty attempts to punch in the correct code. Senior forensic officer Petra Amin looked up at his arrival. ‘Ah, Craig. We do have some results—’

‘Thank God. The parents of the missing girl are in reception right now, I need some progress to offer.’

Petra spread her hands and widened her eyes. ‘Okay, what have we? Yes, not too much from Adrian Singer’s home, I’m afraid. No blood, no semen, no signs of struggle. We got plenty of DNA which is being tested at the outside lab, and we should get results by mid-morning. A couple of the techies worked overnight on Singer’s computers. Nothing incriminating so far, I gather. The satnav on his car shows only local use in recent days.’ She looked up. ‘Does that help?’