THE OFFICERS GATHERED in the incident room, seats pulled out into rows facing front, where Joanna stood before a whiteboard. Atkinson sat nearby, to the side, his arms crossed, feet planted.

“Okay folks, we have a critically injured male, age thirty-eight, who was found at his home on Friday night, unconscious, with a suspicious head wound. We are treating this as attempted murder, and so far we have no suspects in custody.”

She turned around and pinned a large photograph of the injury on the back of Gregor’s head to the board. There were one or two indrawn breaths, but mostly no reaction. Every person in the room often saw much worse.

“Unfortunately, Gregor is not expected to recover. Apart from this injury, he is also suspected to have ingested a quantity of prescription drugs, which we are also treating as suspicious. The charge therefore is likely to become murder, so watch for updates. Our priority is finding the perpetrator or perpetrators, but also any family. We know next to nothing about this guy. Clive, any movement on next of kin?”

An officer seated by the window shook his head. “Not yet, boss. I’m working on it.”

“Keep looking. There must be someone. No one in his phone that you can ID?”

“The numbers don’t seem to connect.”

“What do you mean, they don’t connect?”

“I mean, where there is a number for Dave or whatever, it literally won’t connect. Some of the numbers aren’t even long enough to be phone numbers. It’s weird, as if his phone is full of fake contacts.”

There was a ripple of interest in the room. Harper had never come across this before. Once they’d opened up a phone and retrieved the contacts, finding a next of kin was usually fairly straightforward.

“What about call history?”

“There’s an app on the phone called Whypr. It deletes all information, cookies, searches, etcetera, at least once an hour. There’s no way of recovering any call history at our end, we could try to contact the makers of the app, but I doubt they are storing any data, what with the data protection laws.”

“Also, why would they store it if they’re in the business of getting rid of it?” said Jo. “Did you find any photos on the phone? What about social media? Email?”

“No photos, and emails were connected to the Whypr app too. And as for social media contacts, the few that we have for him aren’t current. There are one or two old school friends, but he hasn’t interacted with them for over three years. He doesn’t seem to use his Facebook or Instagram accounts at all, or very rarely. From everything I’ve seen, I think he’s a bit obsessed with online privacy.”

“It would seem so.”