She looked at the desk, and the neat piles of folders she had stacked up. They were where she’d left them, but one thing did strike her right away.

‘The Glen Fallan file is gone. It was at the top because I was copying down your contact details. Apart from that, I couldn’t say.’

‘What about the computer?’ Ingrams asked.

Jasmine switched on the PC, surprised to feel a tingle of anticipation as she did so. She could list any files that had been accessed since it was last booted up, and finally they’d have something solid to work on.

The machine beeped in a low-tech, unfamiliar manner. She looked at the screen, which was mostly black with a couple of lines of white text, the lower of which said: ‘Please insert boot disk.’

‘Shit,’ said Ingrams.

‘What does that mean?’ she asked.

‘That they’ve formatted your hard drive. Erased everything. They don’t want anybody to be able to work out what this is about.’

‘It’s backed up, at least. We won’t know what they were looking at, but the information is retrievable.’

‘Well, that’s something. Have you got the FTP login?’

‘The what?’

‘Doesn’t matter. If you’ve got Jim’s email address and the host, we can …’

Jasmine looked at him apologetically. She had no idea what he was talking about.

‘Never mind,’ he said patiently. ‘What else were you planning to look into? You said on the way up that there was another case that Jim had been working on separately.’

‘Anne Ramsay. But according to the cop who was here, it was a dead end. Poor woman whose parents and brother went missing a quarter of a century ago. Definitely a dead end for us, though: we don’t have any contact details. I don’t have the folder and the computer files have been wiped.’

‘You don’t have the folder? They took it, then?’

‘No, it wasn’t here before. I think Jim must have taken it. Oh, wait, though. I do have her number. It should be on the phone. She called here looking for Jim. Said he had told her he expected to have some news early this week. McDade guessed he was going to let her down gently. He told me Jim would have known it was wrong to take her money.’

‘Why would Jim have taken the case file with him if he was going to let her down gently? He must have thought there was something he could find out. And if you’re going to let someone down gently, you don’t give them several days’ notice to get their hopes up. This is where we should start.’

Jasmine looked at the screen again, the cursor blinking expectantly in the absence of a bootable disk.

Blink. Blink. Blink.