It sounded like the front door closing softly. She shot up from the sofa and raced into the hallway – an instinctive reaction, though she had no plan for what she was going to do if some stranger was standing there in the apartment.

But the hallway was empty. Yet unless she was actually insane she’d definitely heard the noise. Had someone been in the apartment and left? She rushed to the front door and flung it open, the feeling of déjà vu washing over her. There was no one out there in the corridor. Dani slammed the door shut and locked it. Heading into the kitchen, she grabbed a rolling pin, then searched through every room, every cupboard, and every corner of the apartment.

There was no one there. No signs that anyone had been there either. She headed into the en suite.

‘What on earth is wrong with you?’ she asked herself, staring into the mirror.

She shook her head then moved back into the lounge and slumped back on the sofa, coffee cup in hand. After a few long sips the caffeine started to kick in and Dani grabbed her laptop to start yet another dig. She had plenty of reasons to mope, but as far as she was concerned, she still had something to offer to the police, and to the case she’d been assigned to.

Did anyone at work know she’d been accessing the system while suspended?

That thought didn’t stop her, and she was soon scouring the HOLMES 2 system once more.

There were no new murder cases that jumped out, and reading the files for Reeve and Natalya, it seemed to Dani that little progress had been made on these since her suspension.

There was a new missing persons case that intrigued her though.

Her heart rate steadily increased as she read the details. Jessica Bradford. A nineteen-year-old who’d first been reported missing by her parents on Monday morning after they failed to get hold of her over the weekend. Jessica was a university student, last seen by her friends on Friday night out in Selly Oak, near to where she lived in the university halls of residence. By the look of the reports in the HOLMES 2 system, other than interviewing her friends and family and requesting CCTV, little had so far been achieved on the case.

Dani sat back and sighed, recalling the conversation she’d had with the Missing Persons team the previous week. They’d seemed almost blasé about the open cases they had, emphasising that there was nothing they could see that was untoward in the volume or patterns of disappearances. Yet here was another young woman who’d disappeared from the area without a trace. That couldn’t be right.

Was Dani reading too much into it all?

She frowned as she stared at Jessica Bradford’s details. Why hadn’t she spotted that straight away?