They leafed through several box files full of paper evidence, including the confession of Dudley Jives, which displayed a dead, passive police-speak. It was hardly in the man’s own words. The deeper into the documents Gillard reached, the more he was convinced that the initial investigation was botched. The assumption of a black perpetrator was never questioned; detectives had never apparently stepped back to doubt the witness statement of the uncle.

Perry, meanwhile, was leafing through the 2005 cold case review. With more modern forensic techniques and DNA analysis, there had been hopes for a breakthrough. But without a body, it was much harder to make progress. Before the review had been published, Jane’s mother Eileen Morris had died. Her husband Frank, a bookmaker with a shop on Balham High Road, had died of a heart attack in 1997, and the key witness, Harold Garrison, the girl’s uncle, passed away in 2002. Harold’s wife Linda had succumbed to breast cancer in 1998. There were no other brothers or sisters in the family, and the only child was Jane.

‘There’s no one left to interview,’ Perry said. ‘I don’t see how we can get back into the case.’

‘What about Jane’s childhood friend Sarah, the one who worked in the sweetshop?’

‘Checked that. She emigrated to Australia in 2003, died of skin cancer in 2015.’

Gillard turned to the younger man. ‘Lateral thinking, John. What I’d like you to do is start at the other end. We know that Jane Morris has been kept deep frozen for nearly forty years. If you do that in a normal household freezer, at about minus twenty centigrade, then you get deterioration over the years. But as we know, Jane Morris’ body was in pristine condition. So, the question we have to ask ourselves is: who supplies the kind of freezers that can keep a body that long without deterioration? Who are their customers? When did they first supply such a freezer? What’s the longevity of these type of freezers? Who services them?’

Perry nodded. ‘That’s a better route into the case.’

‘Take a couple of days to research that, and I think you should also take a closer look around Balham market to see if anyone remembers our key witness, Uncle Harry.’

‘Do you think I’m stupid?’ Perry yelled at his wife, as they stood on opposite sides of the kitchen table. ‘Doing it right here under my nose.’ It was six p.m. and he been stewing about this all afternoon. ‘I found your hairs on her pillow.’ Vanessa had long, naturally blonde hair. The teenager didn’t have dark roots. Mel did.

‘A fat lot you care,’ she retorted. ‘You’re never here. No wonder your daughter runs wild, taking drugs, smashed out of her head at parties. This is like a single-parent family.’

‘Our daughter,’ he shouted. ‘Ours. Don’t you wash your hands of her.’

‘Oh, yes, hark at the loving dad,’ Mel said, folding her arms. ‘At least I care for her.’

‘I have always cared for her.’ He jabbed a finger at his own chest.