As he typed, Greene said, ‘DI Hallam was unlucky, ma’am. You’d think someone over there would have linked the two things at some point.’

  Luck plays its part in every investigation. The team reflected on Greene’s observation, and Waters saw the detective inspector had something else to say. Eventually Greene cleared his throat and said, ‘And ma’am? They’ve now sent us a couple of photographs.’

  It was a strangely poignant moment when her face appeared on the screen, most especially, perhaps, for the two of them who had been present when her remains had been exhumed from the grave in St Mary’s churchyard. In one image, the twins had been photographed together, side by side on a park bench; in the other it was Sylvie Favreau on her own – a more posed and adult picture. She was attractive without being a beauty – her eyes were dark behind her spectacles, her lips generous and her nose small and probably slightly tip-tilted. She had looked directly into the lens, her head slightly on one side, and there was the tiniest hint of a smile. It was a picture of someone who was feeling confident and unafraid.

  Greene said, ‘Do we need to cancel the CGI work at Cambridge, ma’am?’

  Freeman’s answer was immediate – ‘No. For future reference, let’s see how close they get, just in case we ever have anything like this again. Not that we will. If necessary, I’ll hire a hit-man to carry out a couple of random executions rather than get involved in another cold case…’

  Then she glanced around at the silent room and pointed out that she was joking – at some point every one of them had mis-read her peculiar sense of humour, and on occasion they all simultaneously adopted the precautionary approach. Freeman continued, ‘The chief superintendent is going to love this, and he bloody well should. We’ve gone from virtually nothing to having her nationality, her name and some of her back-story. Now we need the rest of it. Chris is right. Somehow we need to ask the sister some questions. Who was she going to Paris to see? Where was she when she last contacted her sister in May? Had she ever been to England before? How did she get to England? And how did she meet the person who put that cord around her neck and pulled it tight?’

  Waters had shorthand and she saw him using it as she spoke. Tom Greene was making his own notes on a new sheet of A4, and behind her she knew Priti would be keeping another record. The maverick, intuitive geniuses on the television screen are wonderful entertainment, of course, but it’s the people who keep lists that solve cases in the real world.

  She said, ‘Commissaire Blanchet informed me that they are speaking to Chloe Favreau today. I don’t suppose she still believed her sister was alive but that doesn’t prepare anyone for the moment when a death is confirmed, especially under these circumstances. Tom, we’d better hold off on the request to speak to her ourselves for a day or two. I think we have enough to keep us busy for a while.’

  Waters had John and Serena looking into one of Freeman’s questions – when had Sylvie arrived in the United Kingdom? Was it possible to find out from any official record? Freedom of movement in the European Union began in 1992, and therefore by the time she arrived she would only have needed to show an EU passport to enter the country. Airlines must keep passenger lists and those would be accessible if necessary but it seemed much more likely, given what they knew of her circumstances, that she had crossed the channel using one of the ferry services. They soon discovered that finding twenty-year-old passenger records from those was going to be problematic, to say the least, but they pushed on with it as far as they could; no pebble unturned, as he used to say.

  Waters wanted to speak to Chloe Favreau. He wasn’t quite sure why yet, but he would keep an eye on the developing situation and ask to be involved if she was willing to be questioned by the British police. If you can know all there is to know about the victim, you are always at least half way to finding the person who killed them – his cases so far had confirmed the truth of that. And while no one asks to be a victim, it is surprising how often something about them has made it more likely that they will be. Who better to help one understand a victim than their identical twin? With a slight inward shudder, Waters realised that one of his reasons for wanting to speak to Chloe Favreau was that he knew he would never get another chance like it in his career.

  Unlike her predecessors, Miriam had never been in the habit of contacting him during working hours, and so when he saw his phone light up with a message from her, Waters opened it immediately. She had sent Sorry. Just had my father call me. He says he intends to pay for the wedding. It was a short discussion. When he contacts you (and he definitely will) the answer is NO!

  He sent her a brief reassuring reply and saw she had listened to it immediately. There was nothing more, and she would have felt uneasy about sending the text while he was working; once again he sensed the undercurrents that ran deeply beneath the surface of the Josephs family. There was a darkness in those waters – yes, he smiled to himself then – that he knew he did not yet fully understand, and in marrying Miriam he would be stepping into them himself. Once upon a time the bride’s father paid for all of it – Waters guessed that if this particular daughter had her way, he wouldn’t even be buying sausage rolls for a buffet.

  And why hadn’t Monsieur Favreau reported his daughter missing and made a nuisance of himself with the local gendarmerie? Not for the first time recently, Waters realised he had taken his quiet, untroubled early life and his ordinary loving parents for granted.

  A phone was ringing. Looking around, he could see everyone was busy. Greene was on his mobile – he saw Waters, and pointed a pencil at the landline on his desk. Waters got up and went across the office to answer the call.

  A woman’s voice said, ‘DI Greene?’

  Waters explained what was happening and gave her his name. She said, ‘Oh, hello. You were running the crime scene when Michelle Simms was found up at Pinehills. It’s Sally Lonsdale.’

  When the county’s head of forensics calls, your heart doesn’t exactly skip a beat but it’s a moment nonetheless – Waters’ mind quickly went through the inventory of material they had waiting for results. Sally Lonsdale was saying, ‘… you used to hang around with that disreputable Smith character.’

  Smith had rated her highly and Waters guessed the respect had been mutual. He said, ‘Guilty as charged. He got me into a lot of trouble.’

  She laughed and asked whether he kept in touch with his former sergeant – he told her briefly about Drifts End. She said it sounded wonderful and to remember her to DC. Then she was business-like again.

  ‘DI Greene asked me to call if we got anywhere with his latest mission impossible. One hair follicle? I presume you know something about this?’

  Yes, said Waters, confessing that he had spent far too long staring at and thinking about that solitary pubic hair. Sally said, ‘Well, the gods are smiling on somebody at your place. We’ve run the preliminaries and there’s a match in the system.’

  Waters looked around the office – he would have admitted to enjoying the brief moment in which he had this and no one else did. He asked Sally exactly what they’d found, and she said, ‘Just that there’s something – or someone. You might not be aware but we can run it from here nowadays, or I can send you the data and you can run it yourselves – that’s what we used to do. Your decision, sergeant.’

  Greene was still busy on a call. Serena didn’t miss much in the office, though, and she had one eye on Waters now. He raised an eyebrow in her direction and said to Sally Lonsdale, ‘Can you run it now while I’m on the line?’

  He had written down the date, the time of this call and her name; while he waited, he wondered, and then Serena was behind him, reading what he’d put on the notepad. She said, ‘Is it that hair?’ and he nodded. A minute in these circumstances is an eternity. He could hear the tapping of a keyboard and Sally murmuring to someone else but he couldn’t catch the words – at a guess, she had another pair of eyes on it because a single error at this stage can bring down a case in the Crown Court many months later.

  Then Sally said, ‘OK. This will all be in an email to DI Greene straight away. Your match is to a sample taken after a drink-driving arrest nine years ago. It’s a fifty-two per cent match to one James Simon Leadsom.’

  ‘First things first,’ Freeman said. ‘Are there any other siblings? That’s critical – we have to be able to shut that down immediately if anyone suggests it. Fifty-two per cent is a sibling and the DNA tells us this is a brother. If there are no other siblings, we’re looking at Ronnie Leadsom.’

  Greene intervened – ‘Known siblings, ma’am. It’s conceivable James Leadsom has that relationship with someone else he is unaware of, as any of us might.’

  She looked at her detective inspector with something akin to horror and said, ‘A long-lost brother? Who just happened to be at Wissingham Hall at the same time as Ronnie Leadsom? Can you give me the odds on that, Tom?’

  Greene confessed that he could not and Clive Betts suggested that there were not enough spaces on a calculator to show numbers like those.

  Freeman moved on and said, ‘Next. We’ve had to question whether Sylvie Favreau was actually at the festival up to now. It was conceivable, just, that her body happened to be found nearby but that she had nothing to do with Wissingham. We now have a strong indication she was there because we know Ronnie Leadsom was. At least, this is a strong indication to me that they encountered each other at the festival.’ She looked about her and said, ‘Unless someone has another explanation as to how his pubic hair got into Sylvie’s T-shirt…’

  Her gaze rested upon Greene, who looked for a moment as if he might rise to the challenge before thinking better of it.

  ‘Third. While the evidence now tells us Ronnie met her, it doesn’t prove he did her any harm. It makes him a vital witness at this stage, and nothing more. Finally. I have total confidence in John’s judgement. Is there anyone here who doesn’t feel the same?’

  Freeman left a short pause but it wasn’t a serious question, and Murray didn’t seem to mind in the least that she had asked it. Freeman went on, ‘In which case, Leadsom wasn’t telling us everything he knows about his brother. We now urgently need to know everything he hasn’t told us, so we’re interviewing him again but this time on our terms. Thoughts, please.’

  All agreed that the next interview should not take place in Leadsom’s Lincolnshire fortress, behind his fences, gates and security cameras, if that could be avoided. They had no grounds for an arrest, unless, as Greene pointed out, someone had only glanced at the forensics results and made a slight error. They considered it but John Murray pointed out that if Leadsom decided to involve his own legal representatives they would probably be quite good.

  Their options were limited, then. The decision was that Murray should make contact on the mobile number Leadsom had given him, and invite him into Lake Central on the pretext that they believed they had established Ronnie’s whereabouts but there were concerns about his safety and well-being – as Ronnie’s nearest relative, they thought James would want to be involved in how the police should handle the matter. Murray should say if asked that there were delicate and confidential matters involved which they could not reveal over the phone. Would Mr Leadsom be making his own way to Kings Lake or should they send a car for him?

  This was as low-key and unthreatening as they could make it sound, and some of the team believed their target would simply decline the invitation; in her response to that, Waters saw something in Cara Freeman that reminded him of Smith – the ability to simultaneously apply logic whilst projecting oneself imaginatively into the mind of another. She said, ‘If we’re wrong and he knows nothing, he might be interested enough to come and find out – he’d have nothing to lose by doing so. If we’re right, and he does know more than he’s letting on, he’s going to want to know what we know or think we know, isn’t he? Either way, he might go for it.’

  And then to Clive Betts, ‘I can just about accept Ronnie never had a proper job and never paid tax or national insurance. But he must have had a bank account, surely to God. Have we tried that?’

  Plainly he had – Clive looked at Greene who said, ‘The only central register of bank accounts is held under MLD5, the anti-money laundering directive. Access is only through the National Crime Agency, ma’am…’

  Freeman rolled her eyes a little as she said, ‘Oh. Sod it. I’m already on their radar. We’ll keep that as a last resort. What about medical records? Ronnie’s forty-something. He must have been ill… And he might be dead. Has anyone considered looking for a death certificate? Because if James Leadsom knows that, we’re going to look really dumb.’

  Greene informed her that there was no death certificate filed for a Ronald Leadsom, and Betts said, ‘I’m waiting for a call back from an executive officer in the DHSC, ma’am.’

  Freeman was moving at speed now and this was something she could communicate to others without saying a word; she looked at Clive Betts and he said, ‘I’ll chase that up now.’

  To Tom Greene – ‘Are we cleared for landing in Lincolnshire?’

  She was asking whether he had spoken to his former county about Norfolk officers operating on their patch. Greene said, ‘Yes, we are. They’ve asked to be kept informed, that’s all.’

  Finally she looked at Murray and said, ‘OK, John. Make the call.’

  Chapter Eighteen

  Murray had made the first call at eleven minutes after one o’clock. There had been no answer and eventually there was a recording inviting him to leave a message, which he did not do. He made three more attempts, leaving a few minutes between each one and noting down the times. After that, the team agreed the wording of a message for Leadsom including the phrase “his next of kin”, the “his” referring to Ronnie – they took care to make the whole thing sound as unthreatening as possible, and Murray duly left it after the next call also went unanswered.

  Clive Betts eventually made contact with his executive officer at the Department of Health and Social Security – and immediately ran into the duty of confidentiality issue. The rules of engagement on this one seem to be clear enough but as soon as an individual case arises an ethical fog forms around it. After the usual to-ing and fro-ing, Clive’s boss – DI Greene – had to sort it out with the executive officer’s boss. She asked whether there was any way in which he could obtain the consent of the person in question, Mr Ronald Leadsom; Greene explained that they needed the medical records to help them find Mr Leadsom, so the answer, unsurprisingly, was no. Were the records themselves likely to form part of the evidence in a criminal trial? The detective inspector said he thought this was unlikely – they wanted to speak to Mr Leadsom as a potential witness, that was all. The senior executive officer said in that case, she could not release the records – she did not feel the public interest exception merited disclosure in this matter. Greene could speak this language, however; as their investigation was into a murder, and as they had forensic evidence linking directly to Mr Leadsom, he said he was confident a court order for disclosure would be forthcoming. All he needed now was her full contact details… She agreed to call him back shortly.

  Greene was not annoyed when he put down the phone – far from it. He said, ‘She wasn’t discussing that in the abstract. They’ve got records for Ronnie Leadsom.’

  Quiet came to the office again. Waters stared at his screen, at the dead ends Serena had found as she searched for ferry passenger records from twenty years ago. This almost certainly didn’t matter now, the date Sylvie arrived in the country where she would soon die, but you can never be absolutely certain which grains will grow and which will not.

  Now they were waiting again, for others to call. Detectives spend a great deal of time just waiting, and time slips by almost unnoticed. Nothing appears to be moving but the earth is still revolving and shadows creep on, inch by inch. Time is of the essence in our contract with life, it is the ground of our existence, but in ten thousand years we haven’t managed to agree on a definition of it…

  He saw Priti enter the office and go to Greene’s desk. She told him something and the detective inspector was looking at Waters. But it was to Serena that Greene said, ‘Can you go to the boss’s office? She has Chloe Favreau on the line.’

  Freeman pointed to an empty chair and said, ‘I didn’t see this coming. She’s on hold while I fill you in. No sooner had the liaison woman called me than she said Chloe Favreau wanted to speak to us. I said fine, we’ll fix that up and then she said, well, she’s waiting on the other line – can you talk to her now?’

  Serena sat and asked how she could help. Freeman said, ‘The officer had already told me Chloe plans to come to England. If she does, I need someone to take that on – that’s the first thing.’

  ‘Ma’am? I don’t speak French at all.’

  ‘Not a problem. Apparently she has good English.’

  Freeman rarely wasted words when making arrangements – she looked at Serena, waiting for the correct response, which came promptly enough.

  ‘Yes then, ma’am. Do we know when?’

  ‘Not yet. Basically, you’ll be acting as our liaison officer but as SIO I’ll take this first call. I think that’s appropriate. Priti, are you getting all this? Don’t bother answering – it was a stupid question. So I’ll put this onto speaker. Here we go.’

  Chloe Favreau’s English was accented but accurate. She asked for Freeman’s full name and rank, which was a sensible thing to do, and already the two detectives began to form their impressions of her – thorough, organised and not, as far as they could tell, on the verge of tears.

  Freeman explained who else was on this call and then, as soon as she could, she expressed their sympathies for Chloe’s loss. The woman said, ‘Thank you. I ’ave spoken with officers here. They do not think there can be any doubt – it is Sylvie. As the officer in charge of this, is that also your view?’