Rainy put up her hand. ‘Ma’am, do we know yet who the second woman is?’

‘Not for certain. I was hoping DI Perry would be able to tell us.’ She looked around and could see he wasn’t there.

Hoskins spoke up. ‘He’s on the phone to Dr Delahaye. He told me he’d be here in a couple of minutes.’

The detective constable’s prediction was spot on. The incident room door burst open, and DI Perry stood in the doorway looking amazed.

‘So have you an answer to our little conundrum?’ Gillard asked.

‘Yes. Delahaye has all the test results now, and believes it almost certainly is Jane Morris. Her body has until recently been deep frozen, at a temperature low enough to preclude any deterioration.’

‘What, since 1982!’ Rainy exclaimed. ‘Like a thirty-seven-year-old fish finger?’

Perry nodded, walked up and took a seat. ‘Cause of death seems to be strangulation.’

‘Well, perhaps that’s him then, the one sending messages,’ Rainy said, her face suddenly lighting up. ‘Maybe IC aren’t initials, but the word icy, as in frozen water.’

‘That’s certainly plausible,’ Gillard said.

‘One thing we can be certain about,’ Claire said, ‘is that whoever was strangling a woman to death in 1982 would have been, let’s say, a minimum age of sixteen back then. They would be fifty-four now. How old would you say your assailant was, Craig?’

‘I didn’t see his face, but from the speed he moved at I would be surprised if he could be in his fifties. More like mid-thirties to early forties. But that’s only a guess. It could possibly be the same man. From his build it was definitely not Adrian Singer.’

‘And definitely not the bird in the hat on the train,’ Hoskins said. Gillard saw him looking around expectantly for the eye-rolling from female colleagues. They did not disappoint. Hoskins grinned, another successful feminist bait trip concluded.

The DCI popped out another couple of painkillers for his throbbing ear, and washed them down with lukewarm coffee. ‘I’m getting more optimistic about this. We’ve got three separate crimes to map, a male and a female suspect, and two dead bodies recovered. That’s a lot more to work on than we had a week ago.’

‘On the other hand,’ Rainy said, ‘our wee killer seems quite active. There may be other bodies out there that we don’t know about.’

Gillard and Claire shared a glance of agreement. ‘We hope you’re wrong, Rainy,’ Gillard said.

‘We also need to think about your security,’ Claire told him. ‘How can this man have known where you were cycling? You started from home, didn’t you?’

He nodded. ‘I’ve been thinking about that, and haven’t come up with any satisfactory answers. However, I do believe we can make a lot more progress on the vehicle. The manufacturers have promised a trace on my fitness tracker by this afternoon.’

PC Lynne Fairbanks rang the doorbell of 16 Wensleydale Walk. She heard the gradual clattering of a metal crutch as Kyle Halliday came to answer. He’d obviously got her text, as he was wearing a dazzling white shirt and well-fitting jeans, and had the same big broad smile she had noticed before.