‘That body was nothing to do with me,’ he blurted out before the interview had even started.

Claire sat on the other side of the table and reassured him that he wasn’t being accused of anything at the moment. ‘We know the car wasn’t a runner. We just want to know how the girl came to be inside it.’

O’Connell had brought in all his documents, which supported his mother’s contention that the car had been bought two years ago for cash as a non-runner. ‘Originally the bodywork wasn’t too bad as it had been stored in a shed, and I’m pretty good mechanically,’ O’Connell said. ‘I thought that if I could get it running, and get in some of the spares, I’d be able to sell it for a fair bit. The old Austin Allegro is a classic car.’

Claire inclined her head dubiously. ‘So where was the vehicle kept?’

‘Under a carport behind my caravan.’ He described the location, within ten yards of the river, easily accessible from the riverside path, and because all the rubbish containers were kept there, screened from the rest of the caravan park by a row of leylandii. ‘There used to be a wire fence at the edge of our land, but it kept getting trodden down. So when the river flooded right up, there was nothing much to stop the car being floated off.’ He paused. ‘So have you got a photograph of her, then? The woman what was found inside?’

Claire knew they would get to this point, but couldn’t show him either the historical photograph or the picture of the body. ‘It’s not the kind of image we can share at this stage.’

He shrugged and looked disappointed. ‘Was she sleeping in there? In the car?’

‘We don’t know. It might be somewhere that you would shelter just to get out of the rain, if it was unlocked.’

‘Yeah, not all the locks worked, so you could always get in. It was dry inside, all the seats were in good condition.’

Claire hoped that the girl had got in the car herself, but she had wanted to revisit Gillard’s theory that she might already have been dead, taken out of one vehicle and dumped into the Allegro. ‘Your mum said it is possible to get a vehicle down the riverside path, right?’

‘Yeah, easy. The path is only an extension of the gravel drive that goes to a couple of other riverside houses. That’s how the Allegro got in there in the first place. I towed it in. Still, it would have been a bit more challenging during the rain and the floods. Not impossible, but you would have needed a four-wheel-drive, a good one, and a bit of confidence, I’d say. You’d have to know what you’re doing.’

Claire nodded. She believed O’Connell. On the balance of probabilities, this seemed like an unfortunate accident. She hoped the post-mortem would confirm it.

The delayed incident room meeting turned out to be frustrating. Gillard had called in dozens of CCTV recordings from the Earlsfield area. Public safety cameras at traffic lights and Pelican crossings, bank security footage and ATM cameras, internal video from off-licences and betting shops, anything that might give even a glimpse of a woman in a mauve hat and rainbow-coloured scarf. DCs Carrie ‘Rainy’ Macintosh and Carl Hoskins had worked all weekend coordinating the surveillance team, and had got a chain of four cameras which tracked the Beatrice impostor under the railway bridge heading north along Garratt Lane for a quarter of a mile until she turned right into Algarve Road, a tree-lined residential street. That is where she disappeared from view for good.