Whittaker left them alone, and Styles headed to the bathroom, promising to send Anderson Porter’s way if he was still there. Porter wandered back to his desk and sat down in his chair with a heavy thump. He was long overdue a holiday. He hadn’t done anything with his leave allocation since Holly, other than use a few days here and there to fix a few things around the house. He decided there and then, once these cases were clear he would take a few days. To hell with it, he would take a week. He’d strap his mountain bike to the back of the car, pack up his fishing gear and head to the Lake District. He closed his eyes and leant back in his seat. The decision made, it couldn’t come soon enough.

He stood up again and walked to the window adjacent to his desk, touching each ear to a shoulder, smiling at the satisfying click of the vertebrae. The street below was a patchwork of shadow and light, an artistic collaboration of sunlight and cloud. He stared at the herd of cirrus clouds meandering across the sky, remembering playing the game with his mother as a kid: spot the face in the sky. The two on the left were narrow triangles that met at the apex, joined together to form a bow tie.

He looked down and saw Anderson’s familiar bald head dodging between two parked cars, phone clamped to his ear. He lifted his hand to rap on the glass, but let it fall back to his side. There was no way Anderson would hear him with the noise of the street. Trust him to be scurrying off when he was needed.

Porter picked up his phone and called Reid. The young officer answered on the third ring.

‘Where are we at getting that footage?’

‘Turns out it’s not a camera per se,’ said Reid. ‘It’s a meteorological monitoring unit. They have them all over the place these days.’

‘So we can tell if it was raining but not who was there?’ said Porter, sarcasm getting the better of him.

‘N-no, sir. There is something we can use,’ Reid stammered, not knowing how to respond to his senior officer’s mocking comeback. ‘It doesn’t just monitor the weather. I checked and it’s part of a network of weather stations across the country called Weather Watch UK.’

Reid paused to see if that rang any bells with Porter but heard only static on the line.

‘If you go to their website you can click on hundreds of stations across the country and see the weather at each location.’

‘Wait a minute,’ said Porter. ‘Do you mean as in get a weather report, or we can see the weather, as in actually see it?’

‘Actually see it, sir.’