‘I’ve had two encounters with him,’ he’d told the detectives. ‘The first was when he was here in the pub with a couple of his mates about eight months ago. I saw him hand some pills to a young lad who lives in the village so I confronted him and told him to leave. He threw his glass on the floor and threatened to beat the shit out of me. His friends pulled him away and took him outside, but not before he spat at me. I could tell he was either pissed or drugged up.

‘I came across him again about two months later when he was with Charlotte. I was driving through the village and the pair of them stepped off the kerb in front of me. I had to brake hard to avoid hitting them. Instead of thanking me, the guy gave me a load of verbal abuse and banged his fist against my side window. But what really got me was that Charlotte, who I’ve known since she was a little girl, thought it was funny.’

‘Did Charlotte’s parents know what Savage was like?’ James had asked Grooms.

Luke had nodded. ‘Of course. Robert told me once that he couldn’t stand the guy and had tried to persuade his daughter to break up with him. That was when she left the farm and moved into his flat in Kendal. There was an upside to that though – since then he’s rarely appeared in the village.’

As Abbott drove James called the office to learn the name had already been run through the criminal records database.

Neil Miles Savage, aged twenty-five, had form for possession of drugs, assault and theft. He’d been punished with fines and community service orders. Further checks had established that he was unemployed and lived in a flat in the centre of Kendal. A warrant to search the flat had been requested.

Savage’s mother also lived in the town but his father was one year into a five-year prison sentence for a string of burglaries.

‘Sounds like Savage junior decided to follow in his father’s footsteps,’ James said.

Abbott nodded and replied without taking her eyes off the road. ‘I hope that he’s at home when we get there, guv.’

‘You and me both,’ James said.

As they ploughed on towards Kendal, James noticed that the clouds had reclaimed the sky, blotting out the sun and turning the day grey and oppressive.

The market town of Kendal was known mainly as a centre for tourism and boasted two castles, two museums and a multitude of pubs and restaurants.

James had grown to really like the town since he’d started working there, even though – or maybe especially because – it was a world away from what he’d been used to in London. The air was cleaner, the streets safer and the din of traffic nowhere near as loud and annoying.