When Stacey questioned her daughter about the way things were, the teenager insisted that all was well and that her only problem was an increasingly heavy workload at school, but Stacey’s motherly instincts, honed by years of detective work, told her there was far more to it.

Although Sophie had agreed not to see Jack any longer, Stacey knew the decision was not a happy one. Once again Stacey cursed herself for backing down in the first place and giving in to her emotions in order to introduce father and daughter. It was, she felt sure, a decision that would haunt her for years to come.

And it wasn’t as if Stacey didn’t have enough problems of her own to deal with. Her mind was swimming with the names, measurements and descriptions of countless missing men whose details she was trying to match with the mystery corpse from the triple murder case.

Having obtained the victim’s shoe size from the mortuary, Stacey had been able to reduce her list of possible victims significantly, but it still contained hundreds of names. She was looking for a needle in a haystack and was becoming increasingly convinced that, to all intents and purposes, the task that Anderson had assigned her was essentially impossible.

The whole team was coming under increasing pressure. The first twenty-four hours had now passed, and all they had managed to do was to identify two of the victims; they had not found any kind of motive for the murders or uncovered a single clue about the killer.

Morning prayers brought little relief. Woods reported that he had interviewed Patricia Chadwick, but she had said nothing that would justify any further investigation of her. She had also not been able to pinpoint anything in her husband’s life that could have led to his death.

After Woods had finished bringing the team up to date, Anderson asked Collins for her own report. She could feel herself getting increasingly self-conscious as she explained that she had nothing at all to say and that her line of inquiry could take several weeks to complete. Anderson dismissed her with an impatient wave of his hand and moved on.

The team then learned that a thorough examination of all the CCTV footage had resulted in just two brief, blurry images of the Mercedes. They now knew that it had been driven into Peckham at around 10 p.m. the evening before the bodies had been discovered. It was too dark and the pictures too grainy for them to make out the features of the driver or even to tell how many people were in the car at the time.

The only thing they knew for sure was that Raymond Chadwick could not have been behind the wheel at the time the footage was filmed. The evidence showed that, even if he had been kept in cold storage, his body had been taken out and allowed to thaw at least twenty-four hours before it was found.

A slightly more promising line of inquiry had come out of DI Hill’s interview with Edward Miller’s former partner. Sandra Miller had revealed that the GBH for which Mr Miller had been charged related to a fight between him and her lover. Miller had arrived home from work early one evening and caught the pair in a state of undress in the middle of the living room. Miller had flown into a rage and attacked the lover but, being much smaller and weaker, he had taken a bit of a beating. A few days later, Miller tracked down the man and knocked him unconscious with a baseball bat.

‘How long had the affair been going on for?’ asked Anderson as DI Hill made his presentation.

‘About four months. And the assault took place three months before Miller went missing.’

‘Do you think the wife or the lover had enough motive?’

‘The wife told me they had been drifting apart for years,’ said Hill. ‘According to her, he’d dipped his wick on more than a few occasions. She hadn’t caught him red-handed, but it was obvious that he was playing away from home. She said he was trying to’ – he flicked through the pages of his notebook to find the exact phrase – ‘replace her with a younger model.’

Anderson scratched his chin thoughtfully. ‘Two unhappy marriages. As a twice married man I can tell you that doesn’t mean much. Tell me about the man she was seeing.’

‘Ex-amateur boxer. Still goes down the gym on a regular basis. I know from experience that people in that sort of world can have some pretty dodgy connections. He had good reason to be bitter. She dumped him after hubby gave him a hiding. Miller made him look like a fool. He went around telling people he’d get the bastard back, that he’d rip his head off.’

Anderson nodded. ‘I think we should bring the man in for questioning. Softly, softly, though. The jealous lover thing is good motive and could even explain the mutilated genitals. I think it’s unlikely that he has a link to all three men, but I want to be able to eliminate him from our inquiries. What’s his name?’

Hill flicked back a couple of pages in his notebook. ‘Banks. Leroy Banks.’

‘Ah. Works in finance, does he?’

Hill squinted at his notes. ‘No, sir, he’s –’

‘I was kidding, Len. Bring him in this afternoon.’

DS Porter raised a pencil in the air.

‘What is it?’ asked Anderson.

‘I was wondering if this could be a Mafia thing. They’ve been known to remove genitals. I was reading up on the origins of the Mafia last night. It’s a sign that the victim offended the wife of another member of the clan.’

Anderson raised an eyebrow. ‘You think Leroy Banks is Italian?’

‘No, but some of the Yardie-style gangs that have a predominantly black or mixed race membership are known to model themselves on the Cosa Nostra. When I was attached to Trident we had loads of cases where the perpetrators had carried out attacks based exactly on scenes from The Godfather or Goodfellas. They’re really into that kind of symbolism. There have been a few Mafia cases in which bodies have been found with hands and heads cut off or with the genitals removed and stuffed into the mouth.’

‘Okay, I’ll accept it’s a possibility, but, let’s face it, it’s an outside one,’ said Anderson, a small smile curling at the corners of his mouth. ‘Of course, we’re somewhat hampered by the fact that we don’t have the heads and hands so can’t check to see if that’s where the missing genitals are. But if they turn up in that state, we’re all going to owe Porter a good few pints.’

A ripple of laughter worked its way through the members of the team before Anderson dismissed them and they headed off to start the day’s work.

Collins sat at her desk and opened up the file containing the next set of missing person reports. Everyone was under such pressure to catch the killer, chasing one lead after another until they were exhausted. Yet she felt as if she had her hands tied behind her back.

She had been stupid to meet up with Jack Stanley and even more stupid to take Sophie along to his house to introduce them. It had seemed like a good idea at the time, but there was now no way she could tell anyone the absolute truth without getting herself into a great deal more trouble.

That said, she had lied under caution, so if anyone ever found out, she would be out on her arse faster than she could say Jack Robinson.

A mixture of resentment, bitterness and anger was building up inside her. A small but growing part of her was even considering jacking the whole thing in. She didn’t need this kind of bollocks in her life, and she certainly didn’t need to be treated like shit by the likes of Anderson and his bag men. All but ignored by her daughter in her private life, it was too much to find herself all but ignored by her boss. She felt she had hit rock-bottom.

The job had become so much more difficult in recent years and it depressed the hell out of her. Advances in forensics and computing, as well as an expansion of police powers, had been welcome additions to the crime-fighting armoury, but they had been neatly balanced by an ever increasing number of technicalities that allowed the guilty to walk free.