It’s almost an hour since Kate was taken away. Jake is now at St Pancras, about to board a Eurostar train to Paris, from where he’s hoping to catch a flight later today to Brest Bretagne. Silas admires his doggedness, wonders if Kate will ever love him again, whether Mel will take him back. She rang earlier, but Silas let the call go to voicemail. He didn’t want to talk about counselling in front of Strover. Or Conor. Their son drove them apart, the stress of his mental illness proving too much in the end. It would be fitting if Conor were responsible for getting them back together again.

‘You think we can trust him?’ Strover asks, after Silas has ended his conversation.

‘Jake? I’ve known him a long time.’ And Jake’s never lied to Silas before, apart from about how well his books have sold.

‘It’s just that he was living with Kate on a crappy canal boat and now she’s with this new man in his million-pound apartment in Shoreditch, second homes in Cornwall and Brittany. Maybe it was sour grapes on Jake’s part – that she looked unhappy when she was leaving the flat.’

‘Maybe.’

Strover hasn’t stopped since they took calls from the missing persons units in Nottingham and Dublin, looking at the facts from every angle. They’re both fired up. Gilmour Martin’s Tesla was spotted in each location a day before what they’re now treating as abductions. The European super-recogniser units that have lost someone will contact him too with similar news, he’s sure of it.

His phone rings again. It’s an officer with the Met’s SCO15, the Traffic Operational Command Unit, calling him about the marker he put on the ANPR vehicle index. Silas’s specific instructions were to contact him first.

‘We’ve got an intercept for you,’ the traffic officer says. ‘I’m about to talk to the driver now. Tax, insurance and MOT all check out. What exactly am I looking for here?’

Silas doesn’t like his tone. In his experience, traffic officers are only ever interested in traffic offences, ignoring the bespoke crime markers that detectives put on vehicles. There’s no hard evidence to suggest that Kate doesn’t want to go Brittany, just Jake’s word that she didn’t look too keen. And as Strover says, he’s also Kate’s aggrieved ex, which has to be taken into account. The doppelgängers and disappearing super recognisers, the matching Teslas and the gun in Thailand – they count for nothing at this stage. At least in terms of Kate’s immediate movements.