Nicky smiled sardonically. ‘Well, in that sense he’s got some justification. But … and don’t take this the wrong way, boss … but lying is what Callum Richardson does for a living. As a pundit. As a politician. And the reason he’s so popular is that he’s so bloody good at it.’

Fleet had already told himself a thousand times not to blindly trust his instincts – at least when it came to Callum Richardson. It hadn’t escaped him, for instance, that there was a possibility the CCTV footage was fake. The intruder, the timestamp, the note: everything. It could explain why Richardson hadn’t reported the break-in at the time it was supposed to have happened, and perhaps why he’d stalled on submitting to an interview with Fleet. And there was no question Richardson had the resources. Just as he had the resources, probably, to have somebody like Lance Wheeler killed, even if he hadn’t been directly involved himself. Perhaps that was the reason Melissa went to ground: after looking for Lance and finding out what had happened to him, she was worried that she would be next.

It sounded outlandish, like something out of a political thriller – about as likely, in fact, as Richardson’s contention that the establishment had set the whole thing up in order to frame him. But Fleet wasn’t naive. He knew that it wasn’t only in places like Russia that people were murdered for political reasons. Even if the footage proved real, for example, Richardson might still have ordered Lance’s death. If Lance had been the person in the footage, say, and Richardson had somehow found out that his former schoolmate had been the one behind the note.

Your turn to hide …

Whatever the truth, Fleet had been relying on his intuition for the vast majority of his career, and it was a hard habit to talk himself out of. And there was one thing he was sure of in his gut: Callum Richardson was at the centre of things somehow. Maybe Fleet had believed the man, but he certainly didn’t trust him.

‘You know what I keep coming back to?’ Fleet said. ‘The anonymous tip. Why now, after all these years? Ben was dead and buried. Who benefits from dragging everything up, almost a quarter of a century after whatever happened?’

There were so many dangling threads, it was hard to know which to grab and start tugging. And there was something else that was nagging at Fleet: that feeling he’d had before, that they were somehow up against a ticking clock.

Nicky sat down on the edge of Fleet’s desk. ‘So what now?’ she said. ‘Do we go back to Burton and the brass? Ask them for permission to conduct a full-scale search for Melissa? Get the news outlets on board, social media, everything?’