“I wouldn’t say it’s been wasted,” Banks said, as he and Winsome started heading for the door, past the classical rape scenes. “In fact, it’s been most informative.”

“Make sure you don’t lose your way home in the fog,” Caxton called out after them.

“Don’t worry,” Banks called back. “We won’t.”

ANNIE KNEW that Doug Wilson must be as tired as the rest of the team. He may have felt at times like a spare part in the events of the last week or so, but he had spent a great deal of time in a darkened room with a couple of DCs from County HQ watching hours of boring CCTV footage of the roads around Bradham Lane and the Strip in Wytherton. They had got nothing from the latter. Either the cameras weren’t working, there weren’t any or the drives had been reused since Mimosa Moffat’s departure. And they had got too much from the former, wasting hours tracking down cars and their owners, checking movements, alibis, police records. Apart from the stolen car, finally found burned out in a quarry outside Ripon, and the white van possibly used to carry Mimosa Moffat, they had found nothing of interest. They were still trying to find the car thief, with the help of the Ripon police, but to no avail. And the car was such a mess that there was unlikely to be much useful evidence in the remains.

So they were left with Jim Nuttall, rare auto parts supplier of Stockton-on-Tees, who had lied about being on the road at the time of Mimosa’s ordeal, delivering a shipment to a dealer in Southampton. And that was why Annie was sitting in the passenger seat of a police Skoda with Wilson driving, on the busy A66 east of the A1, shortly after her interview with Sunny Rana. She thought Doug needed to get out of the darkened room for a while, and he seemed more than willing to accompany her.

There was nothing else she could be doing at the moment. Everything was in hand. The preliminary search of Sunny’s flat had uncovered small quantities of heroin, cocaine, marijuana and ecstasy, but no ketamine. Sunny’s accomplices—Faisal Sabzwari, Ismail Hossaini and Hassan Azizi—along with the three cousins from Dewsbury, were busy telling their stories to detective constables and sergeants who probably had far better interviewing techniques than either Annie or Banks. Three of the Wytherton girls were in Eastvale now, in the “rape suite” especially designed for victims of sexual assault, with dim lighting and soothing music playing softly in the background. Their stories were slowly being coaxed out of them under promises of anonymity. There was really nothing to do but let the procedures follow their course and find out why Jim Nuttall had lied to Doug Wilson about the day he had made his deliveries.