She had his attention now, a kind of crazed horror scribbled all over his face.

‘He had slipped trying to climb a razor wire fence during a burglary. Went right through his jeans and sliced into the scrotal sac. Imagine that, eh? Needed nine very careful self-dissolving stitches.’ She mimed the action, slowly, her hand just above Townsend’s crotch.

‘Anaesthetic?’ croaked Townsend, his eyes bulging.

‘Aye, but only a local.’ She held up one hand between their proximate faces, as if grasping something tiny between finger and thumb. ‘A wee sharp needle. I just want you to remember what I’m capable of. A bit of respect might be handy. Okay?’ She tweaked his ear.

Townsend’s head moved like one of those dogs from the parcel shelves of 1990s cars. ‘Okay, Rainy. I’m really sorry. I’ll get it started now. Should only take a couple of hours.’

It was early afternoon when Gillard hobbled in to the Mount Browne incident room for the meeting that he had called. He had a bandaged ear, a dressing on his cheek, and hobbled like a man of ninety. He got plenty of sympathy from the female members of the team, and plenty of jokes from the men.

‘Blind dentist you were seeing?’ Hoskins asked.

‘You’ll be blacklisted as a no-show for your appointment,’ Rainy Macintosh warned.

After he had given them a brief account of the morning’s hit and run, he turned the meeting over to DI Claire Mulholland, so he could sit down. It seemed that it was his back, and the wound caused by the disintegrating mobile phone, that was causing the most pain.

In his absence, Hoskins had combed the police national computer and the DVLA to see what exactly they could learn about the Mitsubishi Warrior. Of course all the information pertained to the owner, Mr Kyle Halliday, not to the thief who’d stolen it. Hoskins rang Halliday, who said it did not have a fitted satnav. In fact the detective constable fully expected to find the vehicle burned out somewhere, having outlived its usefulness, but so far there were no reports.

‘The first thing I want to concentrate on are the messages from IC,’ Claire said. ‘As you know some of them referred to DCI Gillard by name. It could simply be a hoax, but then it could be significant, particularly in light of the attempt on his life. Using cell site analysis we’ve traced the location where the first message was sent from, and as close as we can establish it is the bus stop from which Beatrice disappeared. The second message was sent from an even more significant location. Just north of the village of Bletchingley, almost the same spot at which our SIO was attacked, and just a few minutes later.’

A gasp went around the room.

‘So I think the entire inquiry is morphing.’ She turned to a whiteboard on which the various salient points had been listed. ‘We’re now linking the murders of the two women whose bodies were found in the River Wey to the attempted murder of our own SIO, and the theft of a Mitsubishi Warrior on Monday of last week.’