‘Leave it with me,’ Tanner said. ‘I’ll get to work on it. But I know how difficult things are out there because it’s just taken me an hour and a half to get in instead of the usual twenty minutes.’

James said he would keep Tanner informed and hung up.

Just as he did so the inspector seized his attention.

‘The owner of the garden centre here in the village just phoned 999, sir,’ he said. ‘He claims he’s found a body on the property.’

CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

The patrol car beat them to the garden centre. DC Abbott pulled up behind it in her Fiat and she and James climbed out.

Fortunately, the wind had eased by this time and so had the snow. It was still falling but less aggressively.

There was a low wall in front of the small, single-storey building, and the uniformed officer from the patrol car was standing on the other side of it.

By peering over the wall James could see victim number three. The scene was similar to the one he had encountered on Sunday morning. But Charlie Jenkins had been lying on his back in the field. This poor soul was face down.

‘The owner of the garden centre is a Mr Paul Granger,’ the officer said. ‘I told him to wait inside. He found the body when he arrived to open up. He brushed off some of the snow just to make sure it wasn’t a pile of clothes or something else.’

‘It’s definitely a fella,’ DC Abbott said, and that was obvious to James as well.

The guy was wearing black trainers, denim jeans and a thick green coat. But his face wasn’t visible and the back of his head was sprinkled with snowflakes.

‘We need to turn him over,’ James said. ‘See what we’ve got.’

He did it with the help of the uniformed officer, and once the victim was on his back, they saw the blood that stained the front of his coat and the flattened snow beneath him.

But the sight of the man’s face came as a bigger shock to James.

He let out an involuntary gasp when he saw that the killer’s latest victim was none other than Daniel Curtis.

It took them a few minutes to establish certain facts.

Daniel Curtis had been stabbed twice in the stomach. He’d bled profusely and had almost certainly died very quickly.

The attack had taken place barely twenty-five yards from his father’s bungalow. In his coat pocket they found his mobile phone, which was password-protected, and his wallet. Stuffed loosely in the wallet was a receipt for drinks at The King’s Head dated the previous evening.

‘My guess is he was walking home from the pub when he was attacked,’ James said. ‘It would have happened on the pavement and he either fell or was pushed over the wall. Any footprints the killer might have left have been erased by the snow.’

‘So, it’s possible he was followed from the pub.’ Abbott said. ‘And this was the perfect place to strike. The garden centre on one side of the road and an open field on the other. And the snow would have helped conceal his actions.’