Ingrams took his eyes off the road for a fraction of a second, long enough to turn and give her a very curious look: partly incredulous, partly suspicious, partly guarded, but wholly surprised. Wherever he thought their little interview was going, this wasn’t it.

‘I’m trying to look deeper into the jobs he was working on. The Glen Fallan file was open on his desk, one of the last things he must have been looking at.’

Ingrams gave a small sigh: frustrated rather than petulant.

‘At the risk of invoking your “only the true messiah” principle, what was there in that file that would make you come looking for me? I’d have thought I would be listed as a dead end.’

‘Because your name and the refuge’s address were just about the only things in that file. Which, and forgive me for getting all Kafkaesque, does make me wonder why my boss would possibly be looking through it if you were a dead end who had told him nothing. Did he come and see you again?’

‘Yeah. That’s whose body I was dismembering when the shredder packed in.’

‘Listen, I’m just trying to work out where he might have gone, establish a timeline. He’s been missing since possibly Thursday. If he was here on Friday, for instance, that would be a start.’

‘Well, he wasn’t. I haven’t heard from him since he came down here last year, and I don’t know how he got my details that time or what led him to think I could help.’

Ingrams glanced in the rear-view again. Jasmine didn’t bother looking round. She hadn’t seen the Audi overtake, so it was presumably still there. Perhaps the road had been too winding and hilly even for a boy-racer to risk it. Maybe he’d forgotten to wind down his windows and turn up the dance music.

‘Here’s the funny thing,’ she said. ‘Normally I’d be able to tell you all that: how the trail led to you, what source supplied your name, where it fitted into the wider investigation. I’d have had questions based on why Jim … my boss was interested in you. But all of the background information is missing from the records. My boss is normally meticulous beyond the point of pedantic about those things, yet on this one file, all such details were missing. So either somebody removed all the other documents from the folder, or you, Mr Dead End, were the alpha and omega of a completely fruitless investigation. Which would bring us back to the question of why … my boss would be digging out the folder.’