‘I can,’ Joel admitted. ‘But Danny didn’t look right. We found his car parked at his hotel too. I had our CID friends call round taxi firms for three towns – none of them dropped Danny anywhere near that site. The bus route out there is so complicated it’s barely worth considering; not when I know Danny has a car. Why wouldn’t he take it?’

‘He clearly wasn’t in a good state of mind.’

‘It would make sense if someone else drove him,’ Joel said. ‘We did some phone work too. Danny Evans’s phone was on a chair next to him. It was dead. There’s a period when the phone went dark. It was turned off in the area where we now know he was staying and turned back on where his body was found. Why would he do that?’

‘To help us find him?’ Marsen said.

‘So why not leave it on for the journey?’ Joel said.

‘The barman,’ DS Rose said, suddenly sounding excited. ‘He said Danny left with a man. He was drunk and he was taking him back to his room.’

‘He did,’ Joel said.

‘Do we know he definitely took him back?’

‘Not for certain. The CCTV I was talking about might help. CID are reviewing but the hotel staff said that coverage isn’t good.’

The superintendent cut back in, her tone that of someone far from convinced. ‘We need to look at the basics here, like a motive. Who else has a motive to kill those three people – four if we’re saying Danny was foul play?’

‘Maybe …’ DS Rose started speaking and stood up from her desk. She moved to hover over the photos but her eyes looked glazed, like she was thinking something through. ‘What if you’re the man who was responsible for blackmailing those girls, the man Hannah was after. Wouldn’t you have a motive?’

‘But we’re saying that’s Marcus Olsen, right?’ the superintendent said.

‘Are we? Hannah had another name, someone she was convinced with and I know it wasn’t Marcus Olsen.’ She tutted and reached for the file that contained all the material Hannah had gathered on those girls, scrabbling to open it up. ‘She told me about it. Someone was arrested for possession of indecent images and among those images were some the five girls had sent. She wanted to nick him for the blackmail and interview him, but she wasn’t allowed. The officer investigating the possession offence was asked to put it to him in interview, but it was a question thrown in at the end and of course he just went “no comment”. They didn’t pursue it from there.’

Joel came back with anger clear in his tone. ‘Surely there were other lines of enquiry? The interview is a tiny part of an investigation.’