The man himself had not been identified from their partial profile shot. The woman was another matter. Julian’s team, aided by facial recognition algorithms, suggested she was a good ringer for one Elsinore Mallory, the only drawback to the match being that said Mallory had been missing for four years, after disappearing on Bodmin Moor. Missing wasn’t dead, though. Julian delegated the unenviable task of questioning her family regarding a genuine family tragedy: privileges of rank. Aside from them, Mallory hadn’t had many contacts. A handful of university chums and one childhood friend, Lisa Pryor, who’d been with her on the trip.

Julian stared at Pryor’s picture blankly. There was no reason why she should have looked familiar, but he was instantly sure he’d seen her somewhere.

He checked his diary, saw that this afternoon’s meeting promised to be the particularly tedious and unproductive kind, and decided that he wasn’t too lofty to delegate tasks to himself. He would visit Pryor, to see if that would shake loose the thorn of memory pricking at the inside of his skull.

Mid-afternoon and he was on his way to Hemel in the company of Detective Sergeant Grace Lawrence. She was one of Royce’s people, also trying to track Elsinore Mallory for the White murders. Lawrence was a young black woman who plainly reckoned, with some justification, that Julian had been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, and wasn’t afraid to jab him about it.

Half the drive was spent on the phone to Josie after John came home with a cut lip and a shiner. She reckoned it was Julian’s turn to talk to the school about their anti-bullying policy. She also reckoned—not explicitly, but it hovered about her words like a ghost—that Julian could be doing more at home for John. In that, she was probably right. He made vague noises about the pressures of the job, national security, that sort of thing, feeling wretched as the words came out of his mouth, but unable to stop himself.

Lisa Pryor lived on the fourth floor of a reasonably intact block of flats, and that was more than Julian had expected. Her employment, such as it was, lay in writing lurid articles about the occult for websites and the occasional special-interest magazine. He’d watched a clip on his phone where a two-years-younger Pryor had been on the local news when someone reckoned there was a big cat on the loose on Blackbirds Moor, although Julian reckoned it would be hard to lose even quite a small cat there. Her activities meant she had an online footprint as big as some small-time pop stars. There were apparently about a million websites obsessed with weird creatures—and they all bled into the flat earth and other fringe sites, with a cavalier attitude to reprinting each other’s articles.