‘Neither did my ex-wife,’ Randy replied. He sucked and then exhaled theatrically. ‘She wasn’t happy when she found out, I can tell you. Her solicitor tried to claim medical damages as part of the divorce settlement. Said I’d aggravated her asthma.’

‘Which ex-wife was this?’

‘Contestant number three. She was right, I suppose. It’s a disgusting habit. Now I only smoke to spite her. And when I feel I really have to.’

They stood in silence until their cigarettes were finished. Randy stubbed his out on a nearby mooring. He joined Fleet in staring at the coal-black water.

‘It’s good news, you realise,’ he said at last. ‘I mean, not for Melissa Haynes, obviously.’ He glanced back at his colleagues working along the dock, then turned to face Fleet more fully. ‘But it wasn’t her, Rob. It wasn’t Nicky. There’s no reason to believe she isn’t alive.’

As if in answer, the water lapped at the wall of the dock, making a gurgling noise that to Fleet’s ear sounded a lot like a laugh. It wasn’t Nicky, that was true. The officers first on the scene had been too quick in connecting the discovery of a woman’s body with the proximity of Nicky’s broken phone and abandoned car. But that didn’t mean the divers wouldn’t discover another body when they started searching the harbour in a few hours’ time.

‘Tell me about Melissa,’ Fleet said to Randy.

‘Rob …’

Fleet raised his eyes from the water and turned his gaze on the pathologist.

Randy read the look, and gave a sigh. ‘She was strangled, exactly like Lance Wheeler and Ben. I won’t know for sure until I see her lungs, but it’s my feeling that was what killed her, not the water. At a guess …’ The pathologist hesitated, perhaps anticipating Fleet’s reaction – knowing that, whatever fate Melissa had suffered, Fleet wouldn’t be able to help imagining it befalling Nicky, too. ‘At a guess, she was choked to death, before her body was tossed into the harbour.’

For a second or so, Fleet was convinced he was going to be sick.

‘Anything else?’ he managed to say.

Randy was eyeing Fleet concernedly. ‘Again,’ he said cagily, ‘I’ll need more time with her. But it was apparent right away that her body had been treated like a pin cushion. And some of the track marks on her inner thighs were recent. Days old, at most. Possibly hours.’

Fleet scowled at the water.

A fresh perspective. That was what Holly had suggested he needed, and she’d been more right than she’d realised. Now that their lead suspect had been found murdered, everything Fleet had thought he knew about the case had just been flipped on its head.

‘Who’s doing this, Randy?’ he asked in frustration. ‘Who took Nicky? Because assuming she’s … that she’s not already—’