Edinburgh city’s architecture was picture-postcard perfect through Connie’s monochromatic gaze. The arched windows above doorways, bold brickwork, floor upon floor of precisely measured glazing lining the broad streets and imbuing the most casual stroll with grandiosity. It seemed to her to be a place in conflict with itself. The same visitors who were its lifeblood were damming the thoroughfares, overworking the centuries-old streets and disturbing the peace night and day. In black and white, facing the right direction, avoiding shops, billboards and buses, Connie might have stepped through time.

Gazing across the city in the direction of the castle, the hustle and commerce of Princes Street at her back, she wondered what she was missing. Her frantic information grab had yielded nothing more. Angela had regularly taken her children to various green spaces, Inch Park included. It had been Meggy’s regular haunt too, but the land area covered was vast, and the psychology involved in shifting one’s focus from adult females to a prepubescent female was immense. Sexual predators had fixed fantasies. They could change the place, the name, the finer points of a face, but rarely the race or age band of their victim.

In spite of that, Connie’s every instinct was screaming that the same person who had taken Elspeth was also holding Meggy somewhere, dead or alive. Alive, she believed, or at least hoped. Baarda was off evidence gathering and organising officers to scope out Inch Park and the surrounding neighbourhoods. He was cynical about her theory but willing to act on it in the absence of anything more concrete to follow up.

The police had waited too long already. They’d waited for Angela’s killer to reveal himself, and that pause had resulted in Elspeth’s abduction. Then they’d waited again for the forensics, for door-to-door enquiries to bear fruit. And Meggy, too, had been taken. It was time to stop drumming their fingers and make something happen.

She dialled Baarda.

‘We have to appeal to the kidnapper directly,’ Connie said. ‘I know the team’s been worried about stirring up another false ransom request, but we can ask him to contact us with information only Elspeth will know. It’d be easy to avoid copycats or fake claims.’

‘Why is it you think he’ll respond?’ Baarda asked.

His voice was low and slow. Not a challenge. An exploration of her thought process.

‘The classic psychopathic profile often lends itself to communicating. He might be waiting for us to reach out to him.’

‘Connie, I know you suspect the same offender in both Elspeth’s and Meggy’s abductions, but we can’t jump into a press conference because of that,’ Baarda said gently. ‘Meggy’s parents would have to be approached first, and that would be an extremely sensitive reveal given Angela Fernycroft’s death.’