The first blush of dawn was searing a slatey horizon as Gillard fired up the Vauxhall and roared off to Mount Browne. The traffic would be light, and with luck he could be there in just over half an hour. He realised that with Claire’s car at his home, she would be a bit stuck about getting to work. Husband Baz would hopefully be able to give her a lift. For now, he had consideration for just one person: Sam. Where on earth was she, and who had taken her?

Running through the radio for something to distract him, Gillard stumbled across Radio 3. He wasn’t quite in the mood, but nevertheless heard a snatch of some rather enticing violin piece. It made him think of poor Beatrice Ulbricht. A disappearance, dwindling hopes, and a dead body at the end of it.

His eyes pricked with tears as he considered the same fate for his own dear wife. He was approaching the slip road for the M25. Angrily, he flailed for a different channel, and found something with heavy metal. ‘Highway to Hell’ by AC/DC. As the bass drum beat kicked in, he squeezed the accelerator the last half inch, hit the blue lights and blasted down into the fast lane.

He would save her if it took every atom of his being.

Mount Browne seemed almost deserted when he burst in. No ID, no jacket, no shave. He was lucky that the receptionist was an old buddy, Tony Williams, who had heard the story. He tossed Gillard a spare pass card, and told him that he’d fill in the paperwork himself. Like a man possessed, Gillard strode through the empty corridors and into the incident room. Michelle Tsu and Rainy Macintosh were both there, scouring every report of abandoned vehicles, car thefts and ANPR hits.

Gillard returned their greetings, and sat down at Carl Hoskins’ crumb-flecked desk. There were two terminals side-by-side, and he wanted them both. He was going to search the police national computer for every person who could hate him enough to do this. It was often slow, so while one search was clunking through, he could try another.

Those same dozen or so names had been circulating in his head in the middle of the night, but now he wanted to close down the unlikeliest so he could concentrate on the possibles.

Charles Allerdyce: Lincoln, four years to run on his sentence.

Paddy Kincaid: Winson Green, another nine.

Ronnie Evans: out since 2016. Out? He hadn’t expected that. Evans was a drug smuggler, and very nasty. He’d done some early time for car theft too, which helped tick a box. The only trouble was, he was a lanky individual; there was no way he matched the description of the man in the car coat, now verified by three witnesses: himself, Trish and the bloke who had tried to stop him stealing his Mitsubishi Warrior. No, it couldn’t be Ronnie. At least not just Ronnie. Maybe there were two Ronnies? He smiled at his own joke, the first smile in many hours.