The officer who had searched the bedrooms also drew a blank, but when they went downstairs the other officer handed James something he’d found in the kitchen wastebin. It was a large, buff-coloured envelope that had been screwed up and dropped in with the household rubbish.

‘Check inside, sir,’ the officer said. ‘It would appear that Mr Hannigan was involved in some suspicious activity.’

James emptied the contents of the envelope onto the kitchen worktop. There wasn’t much of it, but what there was sent a jolt of adrenaline spiking through him.

CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

‘It seems that Douglas Hannigan has been stalking his former fiancée,’ James told those members of the team who were still in the office when he returned.

James put latex gloves on before removing the contents of the envelope and spreading it out on the table around which they all stood.

‘There are seven sheets of A4 paper here and on five of them are various photographs of Rachel Elliott that were obviously taken without her knowledge,’ he said. ‘In three of them, she’s pictured with Carlo Salvi. One shows them entering the flat where he’s been staying, and the other two show them walking together through Ambleside. In the other two images Rachel is pictured leaving the café where she worked and entering her home in Bowness. There is also a photo of Salvi walking into the university.’

James picked up a sheet containing a single head and shoulders shot of Salvi. Below it was a list of his qualifications and academic interests, and a note describing him as ‘a visiting research fellow at the University of Cumbria’.

‘This sheet was clearly downloaded from the university’s website,’ James said.

‘But why was he so interested in him?’ asked one of the support staff.

‘It must be because he discovered that Salvi was the new man in Rachel’s life and he wanted to know more about him,’ James said. ‘All this suggests to me that Hannigan began stalking Rachel so that he could collect information on her and work out how best to cause her harm, either physically or through threats and intimidation.’

DC Abbott leaned over the table for a closer look.

‘So, despite his denials, he appears to have been dead set on getting revenge on her for sending those photos to the Gazette,’ she observed. ‘And if he did go through with his threat to pay someone to hurt her, this stuff could have been passed on to whoever the perpetrator was.’

James nodded. ‘It’s possible. But it’s also possible that he didn’t get to make use of these because someone else beat him to it by killing her, and that’s why he binned them. The discovery of the envelope is significant, but it isn’t enough to pin Rachel’s murder on Hannigan. We still have other suspects who are very much in the mix, and the truth is it could be any or none of them,’ he said. ‘I don’t think we’ve ever worked on a case that’s taken us in so many different directions.’