Adam had wanted to be a father, had often talked about surrounding himself with a brood of children, a legacy of a childhood without siblings to share the well-meaning but suffocating attentions of his parents. His friends had filled the gap of brothers and sisters but had fallen away as he’d grown older. When they had moved back to the Essex town where Adam had spent his childhood, he’d wanted to find them again. “I’d like to connect with old friends, Wild.” A few months ago, he’d been invited to a school reunion. He’d spent a few evenings on social media, tracking down his old classmates. Recently, he had spoken of one in particular he was still trying to locate, muttering about credit checks and electoral roll searches that had drawn a blank. But life and work had got in the way and he hadn’t mentioned it again.

Wildeve had been less certain about children, concerned about how weighty she might find the burden of responsibility. At thirty-six, she had experienced no maternal pangs, no longing for motherhood. Now she might never know.

She wrote a single word on a piece of paper: Funeral.

A man with silver at his temples and pouchy eyes approached her table. She stood and reached out a hand to greet him, but he pulled her into a rough hug. He smelled of aniseed balls.

“What a bloody mess.”

“I can’t believe this, guv,” she said, mouth pressed against his polo shirt. She let him go. He was wearing knee-length shorts and deck shoes. She tried not to stare, more used to his smart trousers and ironed shirts.

He ran a hand through his hair. “What can I do? I messed up.”

“You didn’t,” she said hotly.

“Didn’t catch him, though, did I?” He smiled at the waitress and she came over to their table. Wildeve tried not to mind that she had been trying to catch the young woman’s eye for ten minutes. Mac seemed to have that effect on both sexes. Objectively, he was a good-looking man, but she loved him because in the four years she had known him, he had never flirted or been overfamiliar, talking proudly of his wife and boys.

“I can’t believe Roger Sampson has been put on the case,” he said. “Or that he sent you home.”

She fiddled with a sachet of brown sugar, absently tearing the paper. Tiny grains scattered across the table. “He’s come in with all guns blazing,” she said. “They’re going back to square one, to Natalie Tiernan.”

Mac sighed. “That’s a mistake. They don’t have the resources. And we’ve already spent more on that strand of the investigation than the rest of the victims put together.”

It was an unfortunate perk of being the first to die.