‘Near Sandbach. It was hidden away on a piece of wasteland. It’s well off the beaten track.’ The officer smiled. ‘It was a stroke of luck. A guy with a construction business was there – looking for a place to do a bit of fly-tipping, we think, but we’ll forgive him that – and he saw the van. Apparently it’s pretty bashed up, so he thought he could get parts from it. Turned out it started right up.’

‘The keys were in it?’ Dudek said.

‘I don’t think so. He seems the type who wouldn’t worry too much about keys. Anyway, he’d seen the news last night and remembered we were looking for a van that fit this description, so he called it in.’

Wynne stood up. ‘Let’s go. I want to see it. Then we can bring it in for forensics.’ She glanced at Dudek. ‘He may have been less careful with the van, or just in it for a longer period of time and so likely to have left more DNA. This could be it,’ she said. ‘This could be the break we needed.’

2

It was the van she had driven past. The windscreen smashed, the mirrors ripped off, the bonnet up, the metal creased and twisted: but the same van.

Wynne felt a chill in her back. She had been that close to Annabelle Westbrook. Mere feet away.

And now they had the van, maybe she’d be that close again, except this time she would not miss the opportunity.

It was clear now what the kidnapper had done. He had left the Golf at the pub, then walked to the truck stop and switched to the van, knowing that the police would figure out what they had done. So they had brought it to this deserted place and moved into another vehicle, well out of the sight of any cameras or prying eyes.

And then they had smashed it up so that it looked like another old van, abandoned so that the owner didn’t have to deal with disposing of it.

It was a good hiding place. The kidnapper would know that the police would have alerted junkyards to look out for the van, and this was the next best thing. Perhaps they planned to come and move it at some point in the future, but for now this was a near-perfect solution.

But not perfect.

Someone had seen it, and wondered what it was, and now here she and Dudek were.

‘Bring it in,’ she said. ‘I’ll call forensics and make it a top priority. I want to know what’s in that van as soon as possible.’

Annabelle

Annabelle lay on the bed, her shoulder throbbing. It was early; the dawn freshly broken, but she had been awake for a few hours, turning over what Guy had said.