‘Fantastic. You now think we can distinguish between large blobs which could be a van or truck and smaller ones?’

Townsend blew a sigh. ‘I’ll give it a go, boss.’

Gillard sat with Claire in the Mount Browne canteen at noon, him with a rather chewy Saturday special of lasagne, she with a dry chicken salad. These were good culinary reasons why it was the one place they wouldn’t be ambushed by the chief constable or her VIP visitors. The two detectives had shared all the latest snippets on the Beatrice Ulbricht case, and felt they were running out of evidence to examine.

‘Only one eyewitness to seeing her at the bus stop,’ Gillard said. ‘Given the distinctive hat and violin case, that indicates she may not have been there for very long. We think we have a vehicle slowing down for her, caught in the blind spot mirror, at 11.17 p.m. But we haven’t got any idea of make or registration number. Rob’s newly inaugurated “blob-size analysis” says it certainly wasn’t a small saloon, and could possibly have been an SUV, people carrier or van. But that still doesn’t get us very far.’

‘I can’t tie any of that up with the door-to-door enquiries,’ Claire said. ‘The team has visited every house in the village, as well as the pub. She wasn’t seen, full stop, anywhere except at the bus stop, and then just by the one witness.’

‘Do we agree that she is dead?’ Gillard asked.

Claire nodded. ‘I’d love to be wrong, and we mustn’t exclude the possibility, but there’s been no ransom approach to the family.’

‘We’ve had all the DNA tests back now, and as we suspected there is nothing that matches anyone on the national database.’ Gillard described how he had been present when CSI sprayed a reactive substance called BlueStar all over Adrian Singer’s house, garage and shed. This product, the modern successor to Luminol, was designed to react with even the slightest dilute trace of blood to give a luminescence that can be detected by the naked eye. ‘If there had been even a speck, we would have found it.’

‘Maybe he just strangled her,’ Claire said. ‘No blood.’

‘It’s possible, though Beatrice wouldn’t have been a pushover with her Aikido skills. Singer looks more the cerebral type. Besides, that thesis leaves our witness to Beatrice at the bus stop as an anomaly. Singer could only be the perpetrator if somehow she returned or was brought back to his house later on.’ Gillard shook his head. ‘I think Singer is in the clear, and short of digging up his garden and emptying the septic tank there’s not much more we can do. I am now moving more towards the idea that she was picked up at the bus stop shortly after arriving there. I do think we can sketch in some things about our abductor.’

‘Go on then.’

‘Male, driving a van or SUV, physically capable, with a close confidante or girlfriend who would be willing to act as his stooge for the train charade. He has a good understanding of how the police work, a particularly good knowledge of mobile phones, including delayed texts, and at least the rudiments of cell site analysis. Those things I’m confident of, but here’s where I get to guessing: I think he may be a local man, otherwise why create the false trail to London? My gut feel is that he is a sexually-driven attacker, who has the confidence to make an opportunistic assault, knowing he has places nearby to either hide or dispose of a body.’