‘I wasn’t on Facebook,’ she interrupts. He must have made a mistake.

‘You were definitely online.’

‘When?’ she asks, feeling the tension of earlier returning.

‘About an hour ago?’

‘It wasn’t me.’

She goes in phases with social media. Right now, she’s in an Instagram phase. Facebook is too bound up with her old life. She hasn’t been on it for months.

‘Maybe change your passwords again,’ he says. ‘You did change them, didn’t you?’

Rob had despaired when she told him her passwords were simple, easy-to-remember names and urged her to include lots of symbols and numbers. How was she supposed to remember that?

‘Of course,’ she lies. ‘You think I might have been hacked?’

‘Maybe,’ he says.

The one other person who knows her password is Jake.

48

Silas

There are only a handful of people in the Parade Room at Gablecross police station when Silas walks in. A couple of uniforms, one or two plainclothes colleagues in the far corner where CID sits. He still hasn’t got used to the new open-plan hot-desking way of working.

After dropping Strover off at her flat in town, he headed straight here, aware that he now has a homicide case on his hands. He is also aware that he should be at home on a Sunday night, but life has lost its balance in recent months. If he’s not working, he’s looking for Conor, pacing the less salubrious streets of Swindon, checking in with the UK Missing Persons Bureau, trying in vain to find some common ground with Conor’s mother, Mel.

He’s already spoken to Kate but couldn’t tell her much. The death of the barman who tried to spike her drink and run her over is most likely linked to drug gang rivalry, but Silas has no idea who killed him. At least there is no longer any imminent threat to Kate.

He plugs in his laptop and waits for it to fire up. His boss won’t be happy that he went down to Cornwall in his own time to investigate a suspect. Even less happy that the suspect is now a murder victim. Silas will liaise closely with Devon and Cornwall, but out-of-area cases are always messy, the sharing of resources never straightforward. Even the much-trumpeted Tri-Force Alliance between Somerset and Avon, Gloucestershire and Wiltshire has crashed and burnt.

He’s about to check his emails when his phone rings.

‘DI Hart,’ he says, sitting back.

The call is from a detective in Nottingham. Silas has spoken to him once before, a few months back, when the detective was setting up a pilot super-recogniser scheme similar to the Swindon unit. He’d wanted some advice on recruitment and protocols.

‘How’s it all going?’ Hart asks, expecting a routine inquiry. A number of other regional forces have established super-recogniser units, disillusioned with the failure rate of facial-recognition software, and most have sought Silas’s advice.