Anna rang Khosa and sent her and Holder to Southmead to speak to Beth Farlow. Someone needed to tell her Norcott was dead, but Anna knew it would soften the blow if she knew that King had been found.

Anna and Dawes went to Imber supported by an armed unit from Wiltshire Constabulary. They found King in an abandoned shed at Imber Court farm. He was still gagged and taped to the chair, dehydrated and weak, but otherwise unharmed. At least not in a physical way. The same could not be said of his psychological well-being. But then he’d spent some quality time with Shaw.

When he saw the police come through the door, he moaned with relief. They cut him loose and gave him some water. Dawes was all for reading him his rights and arresting him right away, but Anna shook her head, and while her Wiltshire colleagues searched the area for signs of Shaw, she switched her phone to record mode and put it on the little table where, she presumed, Shaw had placed the camera he’d used for recording King’s confession.

King was beside himself with relief. ‘Thank God. Thank God. Have you found him?’

‘Who?’ Dawes asked, his voice as terse as his expression.

‘The maniac who took me.’

They put a blanket around King’s shoulders and the paramedics cleaned up his cut face and were ready to take him to Salisbury District A and E for assessment. But Anna told them to wait outside.

King clutched the blanket around him as he spoke, head down, looking frail. ‘He was waiting for me outside my door. I left the flat to get some provisions and he took me. Said he had a gun. I know he definitely had a knife because he held it to my throat more than once.’

Dawes was leaning against the stone wall to the left of King. ‘We’ve seen a tape of you confessing,’ he said.

‘Of course I confessed.’ King turned his face towards the sergeant and made a noise that might have been a laugh. ‘I told him what he wanted to hear. I made it all up, you must see that?’

He was right, of course. His confession, delivered under extreme duress, would not be worth much in a court of law. It was why Anna had decided, on their journey over to Wiltshire, to be economical with the truth. Give King a little rope with which to tie a noose for his own neck.

Shaw had labelled him a liar and she wanted to see just how far he’d go to try and save his own skin.

Anna took the good cop role. ‘It must have been awful for you. We know what Shaw’s capable of.’

When King looked up, she read genuine fear there. She understood that. Anyone sitting within five yards of Shaw, knowing he was free to act, would be terrified. Equally terrified, having survived, just recalling it. But there was something else in King’s face. A different fear. He couldn’t hold Anna’s gaze and his eyes slid away. A movement driven by some disingenuous calculation Anna had seen many times in the guilty, fed by a desperate hope that they might still have a way out.

‘What about Beth Farlow, Martin?’ Anna said, keeping her tone even, acting out the subterfuge she and Dawes concocted. ‘Do you know where she might be?’

There was a moment, a fleeting couple of seconds where King might have considered telling them the truth. Anna wanted to believe she saw it in the widening of his eyes. But then it faded, his lids dropped back down, and he sat up, sensing – like some cornered animal seeing a crack in the wall it might squeeze through – a way out. ‘I told you, Norcott took her. Did you search? Norcott’s probably miles away from Severn Beach by now.’

Anna nodded, stood up and walked forward. ‘What if I told you we have found Beth and Norcott?’ She saw the words ‘found them’ form on King’s lips as his brows crowded forward in confusion. ‘Was it dark when you put the tape over her face, Martin? After you’d injected Norcott in as many veins as you could find to make it look like he was mainlining? Was that the plan? Make it look like Norcott had wrapped the tape around Beth Farlow’s head and then rewarded himself with an extra shot of H conveniently laced with drain cleaner? Bad luck for him to have sourced a shitty batch, eh? By the time someone found them, those fresh needle marks would have looked old anyway, wouldn’t they?’

Anna could see white sclera showing all around King’s irises as he took in her words.

‘I wondered about it being dark because it must have been difficult for you to see what you were doing. That would explain why you left a little gap. Somehow, Beth worked at it, made that half-inch slit big enough to breathe through. But breathe she did while the flood waters rose around her and Colin Norcott drowned, or choked on his own vomit at her feet. She had a lot to tell us when we found her in that amusement arcade.’

Desperation was a strange beast. It made people do the oddest things. Anna had seen grown men cry. Heard mourners wail as if the noise in their throats could bring back their dead children. She knew how shock worked. King, knowing finally that there was no way out, thrust himself up and tried to run for the door. Unfortunately for him, it was guarded by a very large constable. King seemed not to see him and tried to run straight through. There could only ever be one result. Dawes lent a hand in the restraining. Lent a couple.

King, mewling, screaming, spitting, was finally subdued.

When he was back in the chair, handcuffed and slumped forward, Dawes sent Anna a questioning look. She nodded.

He read King his rights and arrested him for the murder of Colin Norcott and the attempted murder of Beth Farlow. More than enough to be getting on with. They’d talk to him about the Black Squid later.