‘Christopher Hennershaw’. The tip caught on the whiteboard to squeak with every movement as DS Rose wrote. She underlined it twice then stepped away. They both stared at it, just like they had been staring at it in Hannah’s notes periodically for the last two hours. It was Joel who thought it might help move them forward if they wrote it up on a board. Joel huffed when it didn’t have an instant effect.

Superintendent Marsden was gone. She had taken a call an hour and a half earlier that had seen her hurrying away, a last yell over her shoulder to be ‘kept informed’.

‘Hannah’s legacy,’ DS Rose said finally. ‘This was her man.’

‘That’s good enough for me.’

‘So where do we go from here? The superintendent said no to a search warrant, so we’re not getting that. We don’t have reasonable suspicion to arrest him and then search under Section 32 either.’

‘We don’t, we have a theory based on circumstantial evidence. Nothing solid.’

‘So where do we go from here?’

Joel had a thought. ‘Hang on, you said he got a suspended sentence so that means strict court conditions. Read them out.’

DS Rose bent back over her keyboard for a couple of taps then straightened to read from her screen. ‘Condition of residence … No unsupervised contact with a child under the age of eighteen … Not to be in possession of any devices that can connect to the internet—’

‘That one!’ Joel clapped his hands and DS Rose beamed a smile at the same time. ‘This is your area, so this is where you tell me that a police officer can go round and check that condition at any time. It doesn’t have to be scheduled. We’re police officers!’ he said excitedly.

‘We can and we are.’

‘So we go round and we search for anything that might connect to the internet. Only I bring my mates from the old search team and they might just happen to stumble over something that links him to the murders. We won’t need much more for reasonable suspicion.’

‘Hang on there, that’s a Child Protection function and there’s a lot of legislation around it. They won’t be happy if we just—’

‘Child Protection won’t be happy if we ask their opinion, and I don’t intend on doing that. Once we find evidence linking him to four murders no one will care that we didn’t tip off the right department before we went. That condition gives us a search power, that’s what we need. What other options do we have?’

DS Rose took a moment then she nodded. ‘OK then.’

‘OK then. I need to make some calls but I reckon I can get a proper search sorted for tomorrow morning. You can drive, I’ll call them on the way.’

‘On the way?’ DS Rose said.