‘We only met him twice,’ Fraser said. ‘He was always smartly dressed and polite, and struck us as quite pleasant. Rachel thought the world of him. But as we all know, appearances can be deceiving. When Rachel said he’d proposed and she’d accepted we were shocked because they hadn’t been together long. But we put our concerns to one side because she seemed so happy.’

James showed them the page from the Cumbria Life magazine and the article on psychic medium Lisa Doyle.

‘We found this in Rachel’s room,’ he said, pointing to the date and time scribbled on it. ‘This looks like she might have made an appointment to see her. Do you know if she did?’

It was Fraser who answered. ‘I subscribe to the magazine and Rachel picked it up one evening just before Christmas. She said she had often thought about having her fortune told and asked if she could tear out the page. I’d finished with it so I said no problem. But she didn’t mention it after that so I have no idea if she ever went to see the woman. Just as we had no idea that she was planning to move to Italy with some bloke we had never met. It turns out there was a lot we didn’t know about our daughter.’

Once again it proved too much for Rachel’s mother. Her lips trembled and tears formed in her eyes. Before long she was sobbing into her hands again, but as James got up to leave the room, she managed to spit out a single, heart-wrenching sentence.

‘Please find the monster who murdered our daughter, Inspector. And then make sure they spend the rest of their life behind bars.’

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Cold air rushed into James’s lungs as he walked out of the Elliott house. He stood on the pavement for a few minutes, his mind spiralling with fresh thoughts and questions.

They now had another potential suspect in Douglas Hannigan, assuming it actually was him who sent the birthday card to Rachel. If he believed she had exposed him as a druggy, thus wrecking his chance of becoming a Member of Parliament, then it would have given him a clear motive for wanting to harm her.

But James found it hard to believe that he would have risked doing something during her sister’s wedding. For one thing he would have had to sneak into the hotel without being seen, which would require prior knowledge of the hotel and grounds, and then he would have had to lure Rachel to the jetty during the reception. It was, of course, possible that he’d arranged to meet her beforehand, perhaps by phone or text. It was also possible that his intention had been to confront her and not to kill her but, as often happened, an argument flared into violence.

It was agreed that Officer Hartley would stay with Fraser and Denise for at least the next few hours, offering support while trying to elicit as much information as possible about both of their daughters. The SOCO would leave as soon as he had finished up in Rachel’s room and Mini.