Gillard felt extremely awkward with the one nugget of depressing news that he had just heard. He was surprised that Rigby seemed to have taken upon herself the role of family liaison officer when they had more junior staff trained to do it. He hadn’t himself really begun to assess what the discovery of Beatrice’s hair could mean, and it didn’t seem fair to anxious parents to just toss it out there.

‘Nothing significant to add,’ he said. He then trotted out the bureaucratic statistics of man-hours, CCTV hours, ANPR cameras checked and so forth, purely to justify his apparent lack of a conclusion. He was not proud of this evasiveness, but he felt dropped into an awkward situation. Herr Ulbricht was staring at him intently. You do not get to be a senior minister in any country without a good bullshit radar, and Karl-Otto looked to have struck the motherlode.

‘Detective chief inspector, surely by now you must have found out who this girl is who impersonated our daughter? The footage has been all over the television in both our countries. Does no one recognise her?’

‘Yes, we have had literally hundreds of suggestions for who this person is. We have a team of ten who do nothing else but follow up on the helpline. But simply stating a physical resemblance doesn’t help us too much, unless we know a little about the location and movements of each person. You have to bear in mind that she was probably wearing a wig,’ Gillard said.

‘That wide hat didn’t help,’ Lisbeth Ulbricht added, showing some signs of empathy with the embattled detective.

Gillard nodded and looked at her. ‘The brim of the hat kept her face hidden from the cameras almost all the time. She was intending to deceive. It is not like a normal case where some dim criminal is caught casually on CCTV. This young woman, and whoever is assisting her, are extremely forensically aware.’

‘We just need to know she is alive,’ the father said, and banged the table with the flat of his hand.

‘The surest sign of that would be if you had received a ransom demand,’ Gillard said.

Ulbricht shook his head. ‘There has been nothing. Of course, there are many sick people out there who send horrible messages on social media related to my political positions, but then there have been some very heart-warming messages of support too. I’m fortunate I have staff who just filter through the good stuff to me.’

A blue flash from Rigby’s eyes indicated the meeting was over, so Gillard made his excuses.

Downstairs in the gents’ toilet, Gillard was standing next to DI John Perry at the urinals. ‘We need to have a chat as soon as you’re done,’ Gillard said.

‘Absolutely. I’ve got something you just have to see.’

Gillard peered over into the adjacent receptacle and gave a mock wide-eyed stare. ‘Nothing special there!’

When his laughter subsided, Perry said: ‘I’ve got some photographs of Jane Morris from 1982. You will not believe them, I promise you.’