‘Mostly, yes,’ Carr said. ‘Of course we put extra effort into the cases where it looks like we can actually do something. And for those people we see as being particularly vulnerable. Children, et cetera.’

‘And the others?’

‘We do what we can,’ Carr said. ‘But we’re not a big team. We can’t devote endless resources to cases where we simply have nothing useful to go on. By that I mean where the disappearance was out of character and out of the blue, and where there hasn’t been any kind of evidence of movement since. Often you find sporadic mobile phone usage. Or use of credit cards, that sort of thing, even if just for a short period of time. For many cases, though, there isn’t a sniff of where the people went, or why.’

‘Technically speaking, a person can be declared dead when they’ve been missing seven years,’ Gregory added, ‘so these are all active cases.’

‘Or earlier, of course, if there’s some evidence of death but no body as such,’ Carr butted in. ‘Like in a plane crash or something similar.’

‘Thank you, DS Carr,’ Gregory said, his tone not particularly friendly. ‘My point was that as a team we’d consider many of the people in these cases to be dead much sooner than seven years. From our point of view there really isn’t any justification in spending time on these problem cases even after a few weeks. At least not without new information.’

Dani wondered why Gregory had felt the need to point that out again, as though justifying why his team was unable to locate these people. She didn’t feel he was wrong for doing so. The weight of knowing they couldn’t realistically do anything to help these people was the same weight Dani had felt countless times in her career when she knew there was a killer out there that they had to catch, but hadn’t yet.

‘What can you tell me about Grace Agnew?’ Dani asked, pointing to the name on the sheet.

Carr shuffled through the papers in front of her and found the profile she was looking for. She turned it around for Dani to see. There was a small colour picture attached. It certainly looked to Dani like it could be the same person as her Jane Doe. Female, young, blonde. But there were probably another twenty on the list that also fitted that bill.

‘Twenty-six years old,’ Carr said. ‘Has been missing for nearly three weeks now. She lives in Bournville in a rented apartment with another young lady. She went out for a few drinks with a group of friends after work. She took a train home from Birmingham with one of those friends, Victoria Neville, who’d got off the train at the previous stop, University.’

‘So you know Grace Agnew got off the train in Bournville?’ Dani asked.