Anna beckoned Khosa into her tiny office. ‘What personnel report?’

‘Some sort of internal document for their own files. I suppose if someone stopped turning up for work, there’d be a bit of paperwork. Anyway, a name came up. Colin Norcott. He was a patient in Ryegrove after being convicted of two counts of manslaughter. Killed two people but was judged to have diminished responsibility.’ Khosa looked down at her notes. ‘Easterby says the nursing reports indicate Norcott had become very agitated and anxious that evening. Alison spent several hours with him and eventually he calmed down.’

‘She spent time with him alone?’

Khosa cocked her head. ‘I asked the same question. There probably would have been video surveillance. Someone would have been watching. But there was no audio.’

‘Is there still a tape?’

‘Unlikely.’

‘Do we know why this Norcott became so agitated?’

‘No, ma’am. And when he found out Alison was missing, he refused to speak about it. ’

‘Where’s Norcott now?’

‘He was discharged back to the community nineteen months ago.’

‘If he was one of the last people to see Alison the day she went missing, we need to speak to him. I’d like to know why he was so agitated. Why he asked for her.’

‘Yes, ma’am. Easterby suggested we also speak to another nurse called Beth Farlow. She was Norcott’s allocated nurse therapist prior to his release. Probably the one closest to him. She knew him better than most. I’ve tried contacting her but she’s not on duty today. Easterby says she’s on early shift on Monday.’

‘Good,’ Anna said.

‘Trisha’s pulled some notes together on Norcott, ma’am.’ Khosa handed over a plastic folder containing several sheets of paper.

‘Good work, Ryia.’ Anna grinned. It was late in the day, but the DC had used a lot of initiative and Anna felt a little zing of anticipation. At last something positive in the case. ‘Ring Easterby back. Tell her we’ll be in early on Monday and we’ll want the same room she gave us use of last time. We’ll need to see this Beth Farlow and we might as well try and see the doctor, King. And no excuses. Either he comes to us or we bring him back here.’

Khosa nodded. Anna looked at the shiny blue plastic folder on her desk. ‘Right, Mr Norcott. What do you have to say for yourself?’

---

Five thirty came and went and the rest of the team drifted away to Friday evening activities and social commitments. They left with waves or, in Dawes’ case, a head thrust around the door and a quick goodbye.

No one asked what she was doing for the weekend. That was chit-chat. Anna thought it was overrated and her team knew that. But she hardly noticed the polite farewells as she buried herself in Norcott’s file. It made for uneasy reading.

Gradually, using the psychiatric reports, police notebooks and the court testimony from social workers, witnesses and teachers, Anna pieced together Norcott’s story into a digestible narrative. As she read, and the separate bits of information solidified into a genuine horror story, she couldn’t help but recall her mother’s voice letting slip those non sequiturs about her aunt locked away in an asylum.

In 1990, Colin Norcott, aged six, moved with his parents and sister Sara, aged four, to a smallholding in West Wales. The kind of move dreamed about by so many city dwellers overwhelmed by the dust and diesel fumes of an urban existence, whose only exposure to open space and greenery come from Sunday league football or caravan parks in the summer. Bolstered by a windfall from the sale of his parents’ house – a tiny terrace on the edge of London’s Zone 1 that fetched a ridiculous price – Peter Norcott took the plunge. He walked away from his portering job at St Thomas’, upped sticks and took the family west to a smallholding in rural Carmarthenshire. Peter and Tina Norcott became landscape gardeners and seemingly threw themselves into the local culture. She volunteered in the community shop, he offered to drive patients to hospital on weekends. They both took lessons in conversational Welsh, all the better to integrate themselves in the county with the highest percentage of Welsh speakers in the country.

The Norcott children had adapted seamlessly, feeding chickens and collecting eggs as if they’d been born to it. Colin would spend hours in the fields of the family’s twenty acres, making dens in the woods with his sister or, equally often, on his own. Their nearest neighbours, the Morgans, had children of about the same age and the four grew up together. Anna imagined it like some sort of Blyton plot. They’d attend the same schools and hang out together during the long school holidays, play hide and seek in centuries-old woodlands, explore the hedgerows of the Morgan farm, herd sheep and cattle.

School reports suggested a different story when it came to academia, however. Colin struggled in a system that remained geared towards the vocations and was yet to appreciate the skill set of computer literacy. Because that was Colin’s forte. Computer games. Given a degree of freedom most other children never experienced in a lifetime, reports of his lack of progress delivered by stony-faced teachers during parent–teacher evenings went unheeded. Peter and Tina Norcott wanted to give their children an unfettered lifestyle as befitted born-again hippies.

The young Colin would became an easy target for abuse. His school attendance record looked like a slice of Swiss cheese and he’d clearly evaded conflict by bunking off. According to one psychiatrist, Colin became fascinated by if not obsessed with a role-playing game in which the action was dictated by the player typing instructions into a dialogue box. He made his characters – the Knight, the Damsel, the Knave, the Executioner – do his bidding. With the game, he could make things happen in his world without speaking, remotely, with a simple line of instruction. He found this orchestration fascinating.

Ultimately, it was a fascination that would lead to the deaths of two people.

What changed Colin’s life in one dread and fateful strike was a white Ford Transit with the words ‘Mastip Engineering’ emblazoned on its side.

Peter Norcott had taken Sara to fetch firelighters and charcoals from the Texaco garage four miles from where they lived. April brought with it the first real stretch of dry warm weather, and as an avid barbecuer, it was all the invitation Peter needed. That day, a Saturday, he promised the kids they could have hot dogs. Colin latched on to the promise and would not let his father forget.

At the garage, Peter filled up his old Subaru with diesel and put the briquettes in the boot with the firelighters. Traffic was light, but a white van was hammering down the hill towards him and Peter decided to let it pass before he pulled out. A manoeuvre he’d probably performed hundreds of times. It was an easy exit from the garage with good clear views of the A-road right and left. There was no reason to assume this time would be different. Except that this time, fate chose to deliver to Edward Bolton, the driver of the white van, a juicy cholesterol-laden clot to the brain just as the van accelerated down the hill towards the garage. The sales assistant, driven by some odd sense of foreboding to glance out into the forecourt, reported seeing Peter look at the van and then look the other way, checking for traffic to make sure he could pull out once the van had passed. He didn’t notice, therefore, when the van began to veer towards them at seventy and hit them side-on. Both Norcotts and Bolton died at the scene, as did four sheep in the trailer parked at the pumps behind.

One of the firemen later said it looked a lot like an explosion in a jam factory.

According to the psychiatric report, the death of her soulmate hit Tina Norcott hard. The smallholding quickly changed from dream playground to sapping burden. But it was Colin who suffered the most. The outer veneer of self-absorption and solitude gave the impression his response was cold and undemonstrative. But underneath, Colin’s world had shattered. With his sister and father gone, and his mother consumed with grief and worry, Colin became a ship without a rudder.

The community did what it could, but the fragile thread of Colin’s stability snapped in the instant the Ford crumpled the cabin of the Subaru. Colin and his mother tried but his mother’s need to talk it out was anathema to the already withdrawn boy. His school attendance, always patchy, fell to an all-time low.

Tina and Colin’s relationship likely ended the day Colin admitted he had insisted on the barbecue. In therapy, Colin explained how his mother withdrew from him after that and made him sleep in the barn. She found solace in Xanax and the wild mushrooms she’d pick from the damp forest and dried in jars. It went some way to explain her use of harvested mushrooms on the pizza she begrudgingly cooked for him one evening.

She’d picked what she claimed were horse mushrooms. But forensic analysis of the remains of what Colin had eaten showed the flakes to be dried liberty cap. Unfortunately, Mrs Norcott did not see the effect the hallucinogenic had on Colin. At least not in the short time she stayed awake before a double dose of sedative washed down with the second half of a bottle of red kicked in.

About two hours after Tina fell asleep, mouth open, on the sofa, Colin, already confused and withdrawing into his own world, became lost in a psilocin-induced dream. He walked calmly over to the Morgan farmhouse and murdered Hywel Morgan and his daughter Carys after finding them in the barn tending to a sick cow.

As Anna read the factual description provided by the police notebook of the officer who’d responded to the call, she quickly understood the reason why Colin had been judged as insane.

With the office now empty, Anna removed the crime scene photos from a plastic sleeve. She teased them apart carefully with her index finger, not wanting to touch them more than she had to, knowing she was breathing through her mouth, feeling her scalp contract. She’d seen statements from the SIO after the trial, thanking his officers for their professionalism in the case. One where they’d been exposed to some of the worst scenes he could ever remember experiencing.

Anna looked at those scenes now and knew exactly why the SIO felt the need to express his gratitude and acknowledgement. Colin had used what was hanging in the Morgan’s barn to kill his victims. Old tools like a hoe, a scythe, a pitchfork, adding in a few more delicate instruments from a toolbox for good measure. He’d trussed Carys and her father up with bailing twine and dragged them over to one side, leaving a slick of purple blood mixed with hay and cow shit over the floor. Mr Morgan still had a screwdriver poking out of his ear. The post-mortem said Colin used it first on Carys. The same post-mortem also showed that something had been rammed into both Morgans’ brains through their ears using that screwdriver.

A message written on a piece of paper. The names of his dead father and sister.

There was no doubt in the defence barrister’s mind Colin had suffered a psychotic episode exacerbated by the hallucinogenic effects of the mushrooms. Though the effect was theoretically reversible, Colin never quite returned to normal.

Mrs Norcott was never prosecuted.

Anna couldn’t help thinking justice had not been served well there.