Beth dropped the wrapping from her lunch into the bin, shut out the chatter from Unthank and Thompson and focussed on her spreadsheet. She’d got all the basic details into the appropriate columns and was inputting the lesser-known facts. Nothing had leapt out at her so far, but she was sure that the key to the case would lie in those pages. All she had to do was get the details down and then cross reference them.

The job was a boring one, but that didn’t bother her. She thrived on picking over mundane details. For her, it was crucial to learn as much about the victims as she could. Once she knew their likes and dislikes, she could gauge their temperaments and look for commonalities.

As the stream of data filled the screen, it became clear to Beth that while there were a number of possible overlaps between any two of the four identified victims, there was nothing to link all of them together.

‘We’ve got an ID on our girl. She’s Caitlin Russell, eighteen years old, from Liverpool. I’ve checked her out, she’s had three arrests for common assault and two for possession of narcotics. Her family are well known to the local police. To quote the PC I spoke to “she’s a right little charmer from a family full of them”.’ Thompson’s voice was layered with sorrow, and Beth wondered if he was thinking of his own teenage daughters. ‘Still, I don’t suppose she deserved what happened to her.’

‘What’s her story?’

‘We don’t know yet. The officer I spoke to said that someone from their station is going round to speak to her family. They’ll let us know what the score is.’

Beth added Caitlin’s name to her spreadsheet and started inputting the details she knew about the Dragon Master’s fifth victim, while she thought of the girl’s parents receiving the terrible news that their daughter was dead.

Beth tried to work out why she might have been chosen as a victim. The first four victims were all Cumbrians. While there might be others as yet undiscovered, she couldn’t include them in her thoughts; she could only go with known facts. Caitlin was from Liverpool, which meant she’d either moved to the area or was holidaying in the Lake District.

Aware that she could do nothing more than speculate until there were some hard facts to deal with, Beth concentrated her focus on the four people she knew something about. Fiona McGhie’s file was still thin compared to the others, but it would fatten when the reports came in from the officers speaking to neighbours and people she’d had dealings with. And, with luck, the search team would find a client list for commissioned pieces that would have the name of someone closely associated with one of the other victims.

She reached for a pen and started to make notes of the known commonalities. Both men were staunch Carlisle United supporters. Both worked with their hands, as did Fiona McGhie. While there was a connection there, it was a stretch and Beth knew it. Yes they may all be skilled at what they did, but a secretary who could type 120 words a minute was just as skilled with their hands as a builder or an artist, it was just a different skill.

Rachel and Nick both lived in Carlisle, but Angus’s house was in Longtown, whereas Fiona lived in the countryside.

The men were married, while the women were both single.

Beth picked up the phone and asked the guys at Digital Forensics to check the social media profiles of the four Cumbrian victims. She wanted to know if they were connected on any sites, if they liked similar pages or even frequented the same places.

The fact that Caitlin wasn’t a local played on Beth’s mind. It would be so much easier to get onto the Dragon Master’s trail if they could watch the missing persons’ list. His pattern had been two women, two men and now he’d targeted another woman. If he stuck to his pattern of two, then his next victim would also be a woman.

The idea that the killer was operating on a two-by-two basis flitted across her mind and produced the obvious biblical connection: could the Dragon Master be making pairs of mythical beasts? She pushed aside the idea. Whatever the killer’s motives may be, unless the police knew for certain what they were, they were irrelevant to the investigation. Should they guess at the wrong idea, all that would be achieved was a waste of time and effort.

The more she researched the lives of the first four victims, the more Beth got the feeling that at some point in the investigation she’d seen or heard something which would prove significant in catching the killer. She knew the clue would be listed in her document, that it was a connection between the victims that didn’t show itself directly in the columns or rows.

Even as she was feeding more data into the spreadsheet, her mind was poring over all the known and new facts.

That she’d overlooked a clue, or not made a connection, was a thought which haunted Beth. Caitlin may have died because of her failure to work out the connection between the first four victims. But then she rejected the idea before the tentacles of self-doubt could worm their way into her mind and suffocate her thought process.

As she returned her gaze to the list of commonalities, Beth twirled a pen around her fingers. Her phone beeped and when she checked the message, she saw it was O’Dowd requesting that she get herself to Penrith’s station at once.