‘Isn’t Martin Chorley on the Tiger list?’ asked Guleed.

‘Our target’s made a big thing out of his anonymity,’ I said. ‘So assuming for a minute that he is Christina’s dad – which is unlikely, but possible – then he’s not going to reveal himself just because we want a look at his daughter’s room. Especially if we let him know we’re coming up.’

Guleed frowned – it’s bad practise to give people warning before you turn over their house, but if Martin Chorley was the Faceless Man, I reckoned the room would have been cleaned out by now anyway. It’s also bad practise to startle dangerous armed suspects – better to slowly and calmly take control of the situation. At least that’s the theory.

‘He’s not going to blow his cover if he thinks he can fob us off,’ I said. ‘And if he’s not our man then he won’t know what we’re looking for, so he won’t have a reason to hide it.’

Nightingale offered to authorise Guleed to carry a taser but she claimed to have never done the training course.

‘In that case you might want to carry a screamer instead,’ said Nightingale.

‘As long as you carry one too,’ I said.

‘What’s a screamer?’ asked Guleed.

I said I’d show her when we got back to the Folly, because Postmartin wanted us to cart a couple of crates over there and lock them in our secure evidence room. Actually, he meant the library because there was no way he wanted ‘his’ books stashed downstairs in the basement armoury.

Molly came out to meet us as we drove in the back gate. She glared at me and then tilted her head up towards the top floor of the coach house where I keep my widescreen, my desktop and any other bits of the technology that, for one reason or another, don’t work well in the Folly proper.

We left the boxes in the car and me and Guleed climbed the spiral stairs to find Caroline inside playing Shadow of Mordor on my PS4. Toby was curled up at her feet, thus once again demonstrating his true worth as a guard dog.

‘Thank god you’re here,’ she said, putting it down. ‘I was about to go mad with boredom.’

I did a quick inspection of my stuff, but nothing seemed out of place. I haven’t got so paranoid that I’ve started sticking hairs across doorjambs but between Nightingale watching the rugby while I was over at Bev’s, and Molly sneaking in whenever she thought I wasn’t looking to swap recipes on Twitter, I’ve taken to securing anything important in filing cabinets.

I asked how long she’d been hanging out on her own.