What worries Silas is that Ward must know Rob well, certainly better than he knows Kate, whom he only met once, when the super-recogniser unit was set up. They would have been talking about Centaur for months. Did he meet Rob enough times to realise that it wasn’t him walking into his office?

‘The boss isn’t stupid,’ he says to Strover as they grab a coffee in a Pret opposite Moorfields Eye Hospital. ‘Even if he did go to university.’

‘You think it’s Gilmour?’ Strover asks.

‘Let’s see.’

All Silas knows is that Rob’s fears about Gilmour one day taking over his life don’t seem so incredible any more.

It doesn’t take long for the results to come back on Kate’s passport, which was still on his boss’s desk. Her fingerprints are on file – it was part of the vetting procedure when she was recruited to the super-recogniser unit – and they have been duly found all over the passport. But so have more recent fingerprints, which forensics have checked against IABS, a new Home Office database that contains the prints of all foreign nationals entering the UK. And they belong to a woman from Finland who went missing six months ago, shortly after arriving in the UK.

‘Her name’s Catrine,’ Silas says, passing his phone across the table to Strover. Jake was right.

‘Uncanny,’ Strover says, studying the picture. Unsettling too. Silas thought he knew Kate well, but the likeness is striking. Enough to convince Ward.

It’s another ten minutes before the initial results on Rob’s passport come through. Only one person’s fingerprints are found on it, apart from Ward’s, but it’s not clear whose they are. Rob’s prints aren’t on file and IDENT1, the police database of prints for everyone taken into custody, has failed to find a match.

They are now waiting for the Royal Thai Police to call back. Strover’s new best friend, Manu Jabthian at the Bang Kaen Detective Training School, unearthed another old file overnight on Gilmour Martin that includes his prints.

Strover’s phone rings.

‘It’s Manu,’ she says, glancing at the international number.

‘Answer it,’ Silas says, trying to remain calm.

He watches her as she listens and then hangs up.

‘The prints on Rob’s passport match Gilmour Martin’s from Thailand.’

106

Jake

Jake scrabbles down through the dunes and onto the beach. The tide is in, but there’s a thin strip of sand that runs halfway around the bay to a tiny inlet, where a couple of small boats are moored. Beyond it the dunes give way to rocks and then sheer cliffs. There must be a drop of at least fifty feet from the house where he saw Kate, and there’s no beach directly beneath it. No obvious way up.