“Co-coordinating between you and the Met, mostly,” said Burgess. “I’ll be trying to make sure that the left hand knows what the right hand is doing. The case is unwieldy enough already. Linda Palmer was living with her parents in Leeds in 1967, but the assault took place in Blackpool. She now lives near Eastvale, a village called Minton-on-Swain, and Danny Caxton lives out on the coast, as you probably know already, though he lived in West Yorkshire for some years. In Otley. If we involved all the local forces—not to mention the rest that will soon come into play as the complaints add up—you can imagine what a mess we’d have on our hands. That’s why we decided on one SIO for Linda Palmer, one team manager, and that’s you. It’s your job to keep a firm hand on the rudder. I’m available to provide updates and background intelligence from other sources wherever possible. Believe me, in this investigation, the different county forces involved will be talking to one another, and complete records will be kept of every interview, every allegation, every scrap of evidence. We have several complaints about Caxton from around the country already. The one thing you can be certain of is that there will be more complainants coming forward once the news gets out, and there’s strength in numbers as far as we’re concerned. How many depends very much on the access and opportunity Caxton had to satisfy his needs. It’s my feeling, given his long and wide-ranging career, that he had plenty. They’ll all have to be traced and investigated. Possible witnesses tracked down. Locations probed. I’ll be searching for similarities in the complainant accounts.”

“Just how wide is this investigation?” asked Gervaise.

Burgess looked at Chief Constable Sampson, who put on a suitably grim expression and said, “So far, according to the NCA, we have seven independent complaints about Danny Caxton spanning the years between 1961 and 1989. All from females between the ages of fourteen and sixteen at the time. The county forces involved have done as much background checking and taken as many preliminary statements as necessary so far, but we, and the CPS, feel it’s time to move quickly now. The CPS also happen to feel that ours is one of the crucial cases, that it has a better than most chance of netting a positive result.”

“Why is that?” asked Banks. “From what I’ve heard so far it’s no different from any other such case. One person’s word against another’s. What gives us a better chance of making a charge that sticks?”

“Simply this,” said Chief Constable Sampson. “Linda Palmer has informed us that, in her case, there was someone else present. There was a witness.”