She rechecked her watch for the hundredth time in as many minutes. Scotland’s medical practitioners would be getting up, making their kids’ lunch boxes and beginning to think about their day. Many would not yet have even seen the alert, let alone have addressed their minds to going through their files to identify matches. Yet, she had sat at her desk all night waiting for something. Anything. Overbeck had made it clear she wasn’t welcome at the Farzana abduction crime scene. Hers was to be paperwork profiling only from now on. Connie got it. The scepticism that greeted her profession was a known quantity. For every cop who valued her input, there was another who consigned her to the realms of hocus-pocus before she’d even opened her mouth.

To kill time, she’d conducted a little research on Farzana’s address in Slateford. Moat Place had a few small shops, a church, some hairdressing salons and takeouts. That morning was indeed bin collection day for that area. The council website had been remarkably helpful, but a local-issues forum had informed her that the bins weren’t likely to be collected until 11 a.m. at the earliest. So what had Farzana been doing at 2 a.m.?

The realistic chance of Elspeth’s killer stepping beyond his established racial group was so low that she’d dismissed it as soon as she’d heard the victim’s description. Their killer had murdered one Caucasian woman and abducted another. After that, he’d taken a white girl, presumably to play the role of his child. Another white male for purposes unknown. The fact that a young woman had been walking to the end of her garden at 2 a.m. to perform a task that didn’t need to be done until the following morning was simply confirmation of what Connie already felt in her gut. Farzana Wakim had undoubtedly disappeared, but not as part of some delusional fantasy inside the head of a man who believed he was one of the walking dead.

The first email in response to the medical alert came in while she was flicking through Farzana’s social media presence. It was from a community mental health team leader in Paisley who’d had a male matching the physical description three years earlier suffering bulimia and depression, but missing the other indicators for Cotard’s syndrome. Connie marked the email negative and carried on scrolling through Farzana’s selfies. She could only afford the time to chase up responses with both a positive indicator for Cotard’s and a match for the patient’s description, or she’d end up flooded.