‘Sir, we’ve got something,’ a voice said at the back. When everyone turned to look, Rachel Mason pointed at the computer screen. ‘I skimmed through the logs from last night while you were talking. Someone reported that his girlfriend hadn’t come home.’

There were murmurs around the room as Carson said, ‘What does it say?’

‘A twenty-four-year old woman, Caroline Holt,’ Rachel said, reading from an Incident Report. ‘She’d been to visit her cousin along the road. She hadn’t come home by midnight, and when he called her cousin, she said that she’d left a few hours earlier.’

‘That’s him,’ Carson said, a gleam in his eyes. He nodded at Rachel. ‘Go speak to her boyfriend. Get photographs. See if there is any link to the other two victims.’

The rumbles of conversation carried on until Carson clapped his hands. ‘Right, that’s it. Back to work. You know what you’re doing.’

Laura stayed where she was as the officers who had enquiries to make filed out, and then she went to the front to speak to Joe and Carson. As she got there, she caught Rachel Mason looking back as she left the room, those icy-blue eyes watching her.

‘There was nothing going on back there,’ Laura said to Joe.

‘Same here,’ Joe said, scratching his lip with his finger. ‘If the killer was in the room he’d make a good poker player.’

‘So what are we doing?’ Laura said.

‘The emails said that Emma was the key,’ Carson said. ‘That has to be what we look for now, a connection to Emma. Let’s go back to their friends and parents and find out who she is. They need to think harder.’

‘And if it still comes up blank,’ Joe said, ‘we just wait for him to do something else that shocks us. Except that I don’t really want to wait for that, because if it involves another dead body, the attack on Laura is a sign that it might be one of us that gets found.’

Chapter Thirty-Six

Rupert checked his watch, nearly eleven-thirty, and looked up at the police station.

Blackley. He had never been here before. He had always lived where he had practised – in Cleveleys, a small seaside town on the Lancashire coast forty miles away, so different to Blackley, where the skyline of terraced streets was broken by old stone chimneys and giant blocks of empty mills, the windows in darkness, shadows of dereliction.

The police station looked new though, all giant glass panels and wooden surrounds, rising high amongst the office complexes and out-of-town superstores. The doors to the station were built for impact, not use, large and made from heavy wood, and as he walked towards them, he tried to blink away his doubts. He was sworn to confidentiality, his patients had been troubled kids through the years who had needed guidance to help them back on the path to a successful adult life. He’d lost more than he’d saved, but for everyone he did help to straighten up, it was worth all the effort of the failures.

Confidentiality. It was that word again, the one that he had stood by throughout his working life, and sometimes hidden behind when the police wanted information, or when social services were looking to apply their own brand of care. He would disclose what he was required to disclose, by court order, or when he was engaged to help the system, but when he saw a child as a patient, his first duty was to keep their secrets.

But did he owe a greater duty to the public now, to tell them what he knew?

He pulled on the door and went into the reception area of the police station, a line of chairs opposite a bank of glass counters. There was a large window behind him, so that it was like being in a glass tank. He could only see movement behind one of the counters, the rest shielded by blinds, where a grey-haired woman bent down in hushed conversation with a young man holding driving documents. Just routine.

Rupert looked along the chairs. There were only three people there: a young man in a tracksuit, his jaw set, his stare fixed at a point on the ceiling, and a middle-aged man sitting alongside a woman in a suit, who was checking her hair in the glass opposite. Solicitor and client was Rupert’s guess.

He sat down and waited his turn.

The door that went into the main body of the station was busy with police officers heading in and out, talking into radios or laughing and joking.

Not long after, the young man with the driving documents stepped away from the counter and the woman behind the glass shouted, ‘Next’. Rupert looked along the row and gestured towards the others. The solicitor smiled and shook her head, said that she was waiting to see someone, and the young man in the tracksuit simply ignored him.

Rupert looked up at the glass counter. The woman in a clean white shirt with red and black shoulder flashes beckoned him forward, although she looked impatient rather than helpful. Rupert took another look along the row and saw that it was he who was expected to be next.

He creaked to his feet and walked slowly over to the window.

‘Yes, love?’ the woman asked, her tone patronising.

He thought about leaving. This was it, his last chance to stick to his vows of confidentiality. Then he remembered the description of the dead girl, of how she was found, along with her picture.

‘I’m here about the murder,’ he whispered into the glass. ‘Jane Roberts. I want to speak to the detective in charge.’

Rupert saw her eyes flicker wide, and then she nodded.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Rupert Barker.’

‘And you want to speak to Inspector Carson?’

Rupert nodded. He remembered the name from the news report.

‘Wait there,’ she said, and she pointed to the chair he had been sitting in before.

Rupert went back to his chair. His hands were wet. His mouth was dry. What if his thoughts meant nothing? He would have broken his vow and it would all have been in vain. He might as well give away the key to his old filing cabinet, childhood confidences betrayed. What would happen to his former patient, Shane Grix? Would the police be kicking his door down later on, based on confidences he had disclosed years ago? Maybe the killer and the patient he had in mind were different people? He had slowed down now, retirement bringing a different gear. Should he ruin his reputation based on a decades-old hunch?

He looked up when the door banged open, his heart thumping hard in his chest. It was a uniformed officer, heading out on a patrol. There was a police driver just behind him, taking bags towards a van parked just outside.

Rupert closed his eyes and took a deep breath. He wasn’t ready to do this, he knew that from the relief he felt when the officer kept on walking. He opened his eyes and waited for some suits to come rushing towards him, and he knew that once they got him in one of the rooms on the other side of the doors, he would find it hard to resist their questions. He felt the urge to go.

Rupert stood up quickly and marched to the exit. He couldn’t do this. When he got outside and felt the soft caress of summer again, he let out a long sigh and let the breeze dry the sweat that had spread across his forehead. It was time to go back to his life. He wasn’t prepared to give up the one thing he still had: his reputation.

He walked quickly to his car and climbed in. He felt his pulse slow down when he heard the engine rumble to life, and as he pulled out of the car park, the police station fading in his rear view mirror, he gave a relieved smile.

He had done the right thing.

Everyone looked round when there was a knock on the door of the Incident Room. It was one of the civilian workers from the front desk.

‘Yes?’ Carson said.

‘There’s a man at the desk wanting to speak to someone about your murder case.’