The office hung with the smell of air freshener when Beth switched on her PC. As she’d entered the room, the cleaners were finishing off their lackadaisical efforts.

All night she’d thought about the acrostic she’d noticed. O’Dowd and Thompson had listened with interest when she’d told them of her theory, but neither had shown a great deal of enthusiasm about the idea. Thompson had even gone so far as to warn her not to get swept up by coincidences. He was probably right. It wasn’t even really a word. And this wasn’t a crossword, it was a murder investigation.

Still, sleep had been a fleeting beast which had shown its face only for short occasions as both her conscious thoughts and her subconscious tried to find the meaning of the acrostic. Assuming no one was complaining about Swiss currency, she had to make the assumption that the word ‘FRANC’ was incomplete. But France, Francis or franchise made no more sense in showing the connection between the victims or as a way of identifying the murderer.

Any connections with the country of France didn’t seem very apt. As for the names, maybe they could belong to the Dragon Master or someone the killer revered. A check of the electoral register would give her a list of all the matches within Cumbria. The names could then be cross referenced against the PNC to offer up the most probable suspects.

‘Franchise’ might have seemed like a better option, perhaps. But outside of organised crime, there were few connections between murder and business, unless there was an as yet undiscovered financial link between all the victims.

Try as she might, she couldn’t make any further headway without more information.

Rather than do nothing, she reached for her keyboard and typed an email to Control and every police station in the county, requesting that if anyone was reported missing and their name began with a vowel or an ‘s’, she was to be informed at once, regardless of how little time they’d actually been missing.

Before she sent the email she checked the missing persons’ report. She was pleased to find there were no new reports; therefore if she was right, nobody was in immediate danger.

When the others trooped in they each had a look of defeat on their faces. The horrific nature of the investigation was taking its toll on them and Beth had seen the haunted look her own eyes had developed when putting on her make-up.

She brought them all up to speed on what she’d done, then went back to her spreadsheet to add all the information she’d gathered on Caitlin.

O’Dowd clapped her hands.

‘Right then, listen up. Boys, I want you to find out more about our victims, speak to anyone who knew them and get me as complete a picture of their lives as is humanly possible. Beth, you stay here and keep plugging away with your spreadsheet. Find me a connection between those victims. One way or another, we’ve got to predict where the Dragon Master will strike next and then make sure we’re there waiting with a bear trap.’

As the office emptied, Beth felt both isolated and empowered. She’d been left with an onerous task that may just break the case open. If she succeeded, no more lives would be lost. The guys had got to leave the office and conduct interviews, whereas she was left here to collate the information they fed her. She couldn’t work out if she’d been handed the rubbish job because she was new, or because she was trusted to spot something in the new information the others gathered.

She checked her computer and found that Dr Hewson had sent through his report from Caitlin’s post-mortem. Wading through the medical terminology, she learned that the girl’s trachea had been scorched every bit as much Nick Langley’s.

When the report moved onto the internal organs, it stated that the oesophagus had next to no damage compared to the lungs which had suffered third-degree burns.

Dr Hewson’s notes suggested that he thought the killer had changed from petrol to a gas, and that Caitlin had inhaled large amounts of the burning gas into her lungs, which had caused the extensive burning. Like Nick Langley, traces of Rohypnol had been found in her blood.