‘Morning, ma’am,’ Patel said, with far too much cheer for this time of the day.

Slumped in her chair, struggling not to yawn, Kate looked up at him. ‘It’s not even half past six, what are you doing here?’

‘Same thing as you, I presume,’ he said, switching on the coffee maker. ‘You want a drink?’

She nodded, handing him her mug as he approached.

‘There’s some pastries in my bag, if you fancy?’ he said, busying himself at the machine. He really had become her rock since joining the team. Methodical to the last, and with a moral compass that pointed true north, he was like her Jiminy Cricket.

‘Great minds must think alike,’ Laura cooed, as she entered and removed her coat and scarf. ‘Morning, ma’am. You on the drinks, Sarge?’

Patel grabbed Laura’s mug from her desk in answer.

‘Don’t you both have beds you could still be in?’ Kate said, genuinely surprised to see them so early.

‘We can’t let you have all the fun,’ Laura said, dragging over her chair and resting a fresh pad of paper on her lap.

‘Help yourself to a croissant, Laura,’ Patel said, placing three mugs on Kate’s desk.

Laura’s eyes widened with excitement, as she reached for his satchel and unzipped it. The smell of fresh pastries filled the air around them, and even Kate couldn’t resist revelling in the buttery warmness for just a moment.

‘All right,’ Kate said, dabbing pastry flakes from her lips, ‘start with telling me what Nowakowski’s former crew told you when you stopped by the prison.’

Patel reached for his notebook. ‘I spoke to the leader of the group initially. Career criminal called Ash Thomas. You’ve probably not heard of him, ma’am, as he’s been inside since the failed armed robbery at the security depot. He was a right piece of work, though, back in the day; tattooed from head to toe.’ He sighed at the memory. ‘Anyway, it seems prison life agrees with him. He’s certainly not the thug I remember.’

‘In what way?’

‘He’s found religion. Reckons he’s repenting his sins and wants to devote the rest of his life to God.’

‘Bet he’s just saying that to get in with the parole board,’ Laura added, sceptically.

Patel shook his head. ‘Straight up. I spoke to the prison warden and he said Ash has been on his best behaviour for the past twelve months, spending part of every day in the library, either reading or helping fellow inmates to study. It’s quite the switch from all accounts.’

‘What did he have to say about Petr Nowakowski?’

‘He went quiet for a bit and then told me he regretted his troubled past every day and is grateful that Petr helped him find the right path.’

‘Oh, please!’ Laura exclaimed.

‘I disagree,’ Patel continued. ‘He seemed genuine. I don’t think he had any involvement in Nowakowski’s death.’

‘What about the rest of the group?’ Kate pressed. ‘There were four plus Petr and Ash, right?’

‘I managed to speak to one of the others who was locked up in Parkhurst too, but he claimed not to have heard anything about Petr since his arrest.’

‘Don’t tell me he’s turned over a new leaf as well?’

Patel snorted. ‘No, he was very clear about what he’d like to do to Petr, but I doubt there is much he could have done from the inside. Ash was the leader of the group – the one with all the contacts.’

‘What about another crew in the city? If he was desperate for money, maybe he fell back into old ways.’

But Patel shook his head. ‘I had a quiet word with a friend in Hendrix’s team. She said Nowakowski’s name hasn’t come up in any conversations on the street. They keep detailed files on known associates of all gangs in the city, and he’s not been named since his arrest. I think his sister was right: he’d been making an effort to keep his nose clean.’

‘Quinlan mentioned the cruise company sacked him for some sort of impropriety,’ Kate told them. ‘There’s something about a convicted armed robber managing to secure a job on a cruise ship that doesn’t sit right with me. Given their clientele, would they really take a chance?’

Laura lowered her croissant. ‘You reckon he lied about his conviction?’

Kate nodded. ‘More than likely, and then maybe someone found out and that’s why they let him go. Can you follow up on that, Laura? Go down to the head office when they open and ask to see a copy of his job application.’ She turned back to Patel, as Laura answered a ringing phone. ‘Have the vehicle recognition team managed to track Chris Jackson yet?’

Patel nodded, firing up the nearest workstation. ‘Had an email overnight. Two seconds and I’ll read it to you.’

‘Ma’am,’ Laura interrupted. ‘That was a call from downstairs. Apparently someone decided to put a brick through the front window of Neil Watkins’ home last night.’

‘The gardener?’

Laura nodded. ‘They scrawled the word killer on his driveway and then hurled the rock, apparently. Uniform are on the scene now, but his mother Imelda is demanding to speak to you. Blames the news report about the foot and thinks her son is being targeted.’

That was all Kate needed. ‘But the Media Relations team have now confirmed that we aren’t focused on any one individual.’

‘I guess not everybody got the message. You want me to go down there and speak to her?’

Kate sighed. ‘No, ask uniform to pass on that I will stop by to visit her when I get a moment.’

Laura relayed the message over the phone.

‘Here you go,’ Patel said. ‘His van was seen leaving the teachers’ car park at St Bartholomew’s just after four last Friday... It is then picked up on the traffic camera at the north end of Hill Lane by the Winchester Road roundabout… It is then seen heading up the A35, from where it then joins the M3 at junction fourteen, but it is last seen at junction thirteen, before we lose track of it.’ He paused. ‘Junction thirteen is the exit for Eastleigh and Chandler’s Ford, but we don’t know where he goes after that. Given that his home address is in Lordshill, we know he wasn’t going home.’

‘So where was he going and where is he now?’

‘PC Barnes went by his residence yesterday morning, but there was no sign of his van. He called on a couple of his neighbours, but nobody could recall seeing him over the weekend. Jackson’s mobile phone is switched off, so we can’t monitor him via that, and I have put out a description of the van and its registration plates to our colleagues in Wiltshire and Dorset, but as yet no sightings.’

Kate turned to Laura. ‘What else can you tell me about Jackson?’

‘I managed to track a page for his engineering business on Facebook, but no personal page,’ Laura said. ‘My understanding is you can’t have one without the other, which suggests he has his privacy settings fixed so that he cannot be located by strangers.’

‘Okay, go with what you’ve got.’

Laura passed her the print outs. ‘The business page is pretty basic with its content: he doesn’t ever post on it, just contains basic company information, mobile phone number and email address.’

‘Have you found a photograph of him?’

‘Next page, ma’am,’ Laura said.

Kate pushed the business page to the back of the pile. The image was grainy, but his strawberry-blond curls were greased back over his head, and small dimples formed in his cheeks where he was forcing a smile. His eyes were dark, but she couldn’t tell if that was just the quality of the print out. He had to be in his mid-thirties at most, and his chin looked freshly shaven.

‘You reckon he still looks like this? How old is the image?’

‘Hard to say. I pulled it from his business website. I’ll check with the administrators at the school.’

Kate raised the picture. ‘What does that face say to you?’

‘Honestly? He’s actually quite handsome, in a goofy sort of way.’

‘Do you know what I see when I look at him? I see the face of someone I want to trust. He looks like butter wouldn’t melt, but I’ve underestimated people for less than that. We need to find him.’

‘Do you want me to put his description out to uniform?’

‘Please.’

‘His criminal history is clean. He has three points on his licence for speeding two years ago, but otherwise, he’s not in the system.’

Kate closed her eyes, trying to process their next steps. If this was a brand-new murder investigation the decisions made in the first hour – the golden hour – would pay dividends later on. But in this situation, Maria and Petr had been dead for days already, giving Jackson a head start. While not conclusive, she couldn’t shake the coincidence of the heart being sent in the type of box he would have access to as a photocopy engineer.

‘First things first: get his last known location from the mobile provider, and then get his image to the school and ask them how it compares to when they saw him on Thursday. When you’ve done that, take his description to the mail depot in Bitterne and see if the staff there recognise him as the guy who delivered the heart.’