He was off the case, but apparently wasn’t happy with that. Nabi’s brother, when both boys were nine years old, went missing. He’d been with their father, but the father had gone into a pub and left his boy to play outside. Got drunk, forgot about him, came out hours later to find him gone. For good.

Nick figured that explained his attitude towards Anna and himself. ‘But how did he know what van to look for?’

The roadworks they passed through about a hundred miles from London. Nabi got the cameras turned back on, but with no warning for drivers, everyone blew past at well over the fifty miles per hour limit. He got a list of triple area sightings, which meant the same vehicle being captured going south twice and north once, or vice versa. He got it up and running by midnight, and by the time Miller’s car had been heading back to London, Nabi had his list. Two vehicles had made the relevant trips, and one of those was a biker who’d travelled from Nottingham to Cambridge, realised he’d forgotten his best man’s suit, and gone back for it. The other: the Mercedes Vito. With a description and registration, he simply waited near Junction 26, the Nuthall turnoff, which the timeline made him pinpoint as about the halfway point, and gave chase when he saw it go past, heading south. He forced it into the Services, made the arrests.

‘Quite ironic, you know. Apologies for the lie, but it wasn’t my superintendent at all. Calling in the search dog to your house, I mean. All DC Nabi, that. Off his own back. He offered my superintendent the idea of moving you to a hotel, too. And then he about-faces and does this.’

Nick didn’t care. He looked into the van again, but its cosmetic mask slipped. Just because Josie had been kept comfortable, it meant nothing. This was not a bedroom, but a prison cell. Had Nabi not found her, Josie’s captors would soon have found out about the London arrests of their boyfriends and she might have been killed.

In response to a question about the captors, both already headed to the police station, Miller showed him a pair of mugshots. Two women. One was Elsie Watson-Bruce, girlfriend of the man who’d had a change of heart. One of the hired help. But it was the other woman he focussed on. Louise Mackerson, the girlfriend of Dominic Watson-Bruce.