Beth took a break to make herself a cup of tea and strode around the office while the kettle boiled. Her mind was awash with details of the evacuees but she knew she needed to shift her focus for a short period.

It wasn’t that she was fatigued by the amount of information, it was more that she knew that her brain sometimes worked best if she wasn’t thinking directly about the matter in hand. Instead she let her mind go back to what Unthank had unearthed while she and Thompson were at the mortuary.

He’d been given the task of tracing Angus’s last days and had pinpointed the time of Angus’s disappearance. Angus had moved to his mother’s house on Saturday, and had failed to show up for work on Tuesday morning; he had been working on the extension he was building until five the previous day. Suzy had told Unthank he’d called his daughters that evening around six and had then gone to the pub as he always did on a Monday night. She’d asked him to come home and talk to her but he had refused and they’d exchanged a series of harsh words that culminated in him hanging up on her and switching off his phone.

The landlord of The Globe had confirmed Angus’s presence. Monday was darts night and Angus was a key player in the darts team. He had supped a few pints, played his darts and was last seen heading towards Longtown’s takeaway kebab house.

Unthank had traced him to the takeaway and he’d followed the route Angus would have taken to get to his mother’s house.

The news hadn’t been good.

Angus’s mother lived in a house 200 metres beyond the town boundaries, a good twenty-minute walk from the kebab shop. The road was tree-lined; therefore it would be easy for someone to ambush Angus. The fact he’d a few pints on board would make the killer’s task easier.

To Beth’s way of thinking, it was a perfect storm. A tipsy, if not outright drunk Angus, alone on a deserted road, his mind preoccupied with the latest fight with Suzy. He’d be easy pickings. Unthank had covered the bases and got a team of officers doing door-to-doors along the route, but so far, their reports had yielded nothing.

The triangulation of Angus’s mobile showed he’d left it in his mother’s house when he’d gone to play his darts match. Suzy didn’t have a spare key, and they’d had to wait for a locksmith to open the door so they could find Angus’s phone. Digital Forensics had it now and once its secrets had been mined, they might have some more leads to follow.

---

Beth read over the notes she’d taken. Before she presented anything to O’Dowd and the others, she needed to make sure of her facts, be confident that she’d followed all the correct procedures and that she hadn’t overlooked anything.

She’d tried calling O’Dowd, without success, as the implications of her discovery became clear. In the absence of O’Dowd, she’d tried speaking to a chief inspector who was on duty, only to be brushed off with a curt dismissal that her theory could wait until morning. She’d tried to argue her case, but he’d pointed at the door of his office while looking at the papers on his desk. As Beth had stomped her way back to the FMIT’s office, she hadn’t been able to argue with Unthank’s description of the humourless chief inspector as a stand-up comedian who didn’t know it was time to sit down.

Now with all her facts together she was certain of her theory. All of it made sense and whichever way she looked at it, she couldn’t find a flaw.

Another idea struck her, but rather than wait for her computer to power up again, she decided to use her phone. The information she needed would be found on Google rather than any of the police systems or databases anyway.

Beth ran a series of searches on the effects of swallowing flammable liquids that were then ignited. She knew that Dr Hewson could give her the same information, but she wanted to do her own research, so that when his report came in she’d better understand it.

With a few extra scribbled pages added to her thick bundle of notes, Beth stood, pulled on her jacket and set off for home. A look at her watch told her she had to be back there in seven hours, but that didn’t worry her. She was used to six hours’ sleep a night and could manage for the best part of a week on four.

Beth knew that tonight she’d be lucky to get more than four hours the way her brain was firing. She’d experienced a buzz during other investigations, but none had energised her the way this case did. Despite the tiredness and the tedium of some of the tasks, she felt more alive than ever. Her pulse raced and there was an unfamiliar spring to her step. The anticipation of this feeling was just one of the reasons she’d applied to join FMIT.

---

Beth flicked on the TV and channel-hopped until she found repeats of a sitcom she’d seen a dozen times before. It was the televisual equivalent of a comfort blanket and required no mental effort from her as she watched the familiar characters go about their lives. A half hour later when she climbed into bed, her brain still wasn’t ready to shut down.

While Angus Keane was in his mid-forties, it was still too early in the investigation for them to work on the assumption the killer would strike again and assign a type to his choice of victim. What she couldn’t shake from her mind’s eye was the mental snapshot of Angus’s daughters. Their father had been taken from them and it was up to her and the others in FMIT to at least give them the closure of knowing the person who’d killed him was locked up in jail.

As well as shelves of puzzle books, the bookshelf she had in her bedroom was filled with books about serial killers. Some focussed on one particular killer while others looked at many. She had a fascination with serial killers and had read up on every one she could.

Other than Harold Shipman, all the British cases that she could think of which involved multiple murders had young women or children as their victims. From what she could remember from her training, and the manuals and books she’d read, she also knew that a high percentage of serial killers had a sexual element driving them. Whether it was a desire to have sex outside accepted societal norms, or just a desire to have someone beyond their reach, they’d capture their victims and then rape and kill them.

Beth knew it was a sad fact of life that too often women were blamed for their rapes or sexual assaults. A short skirt or a revealing top were used as excuses by the vermin who preyed on women. They’d say the girl or lady in question was too drunk to remember giving consent, that their clothes and flirtatious behaviour were giving men a come-on.

None of the excuses washed with Beth. For her, no meant no.

The men in her social circle all held the same view, which is why she’d kept in touch with them after leaving school. They were decent and saw a drunk woman as a drunk person, not as an object to be used for their gratification. Beth’s male friends talked to her face and listened to her views, treating her as an equal.

Sadly though, she knew her male friends and family members weren’t typical of all men. There were still those who held the genuine belief that women were inferior to men and should know their place. These unenlightened fools were the problem. They were the vultures, the carrion who preyed on vulnerabilities and insecurities. They were the ones who controlled their wives or girlfriends, the ones who dominated supposed loved ones in the name of masculinity. To Beth they weren’t men, they were prehistoric beasts who were still millennia away from discovering fire and the wheel.

She’d had her share of encounters, the same as every other woman on the planet. An unwelcome hand on her backside in a crowded place, the leering gazes delivered without discretion as one lecherous fool or another talked to her chest or legs rather than her face. Beth remembered her brief experience as a model for online stores and various amateur photographers. She could never know for certain, but she was sure she’d lost a number of modelling jobs by rejecting the overtures made to her by promoters and organisers.

Those were as bad as her experiences had got though.

It pained Beth that women had to always be conscious of their surroundings and worried how they were perceived by men. She believed that everyone had the right to feel safe, but sadly, that’s not how things were.

As these thoughts went through her head, she hit on a realisation. When she was on a night out, she’d always get a taxi to take her home. What if Angus had done the same thing?

Yes he may have been snatched from the street, wherever he was working, or his mother’s home, but that was unlikely to happen in a residential area. Plus, it was the best part of a mile from where he’d got the takeaway to his mother’s house. Who would he trust? Two answers: someone he knew, or someone whose job it was to ferry people around. Namely, a taxi. It was the perfect cover for someone looking to abduct people. Angus’s killer may have posed as a lost driver asking for directions, but she didn’t think Angus would have got into a stranger’s car.

She made a mental note to pass on the idea to Unthank and closed her eyes.