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Tom Shearer was lounging at his desk, shirt sleeves rolled up to his elbow. He exuded confidence but his face had darkened when he’d read the message that had been sent through for him, and Robyn could almost see his thought processes as his face twitched uncomfortably. His cocky attitude and supreme confidence only served to disguise how he truly felt about his job. He’d divulged as much one rare night when, after attending the funeral of an old school friend, he’d let his guard down and confessed he was a results man who hated the atrocities he faced.

He cleared his throat. ‘Right. Listen up. An assault has taken place in Hurst Lane. There are two victims believed to be from the same family and both female. One is aged twenty-nine, the other in her sixties. Police are in situ but the attacker’s taken a hostage and is holed up inside the house. Get to the incident room for a full briefing.’

Shearer, like Robyn, had a team of four working with him. The room was filled with the immediate scraping of chairs as they gathered up their necessary kit and hurtled out of the office, the drumming of boots on the floor like cattle running. Shearer followed swiftly behind, his face grim.

Robyn had been reading through Mitz’s notes on Henry Gregson. She shifted from side to side in her chair. There wasn’t anything in the notes that pointed to why Gregson had been killed. His bank accounts held no answers.

Her mind wouldn’t settle. This wasn’t like her. Ordinarily, she’d have leads and ideas and direction. At the moment, she felt stumped and she didn’t like that feeling. She surveyed the mess of files and boxes at the far side of the room. She preferred order in her life, and having several more bodies cluttering the office was affecting her concentration and adding to her frustration. Or was she still half-thinking about Davies? She needed to get out of the office.

The door opened and Anna marched in, waving a file.

‘Gregson’s mobile,’ she said, placing the file on Robyn’s desk with a small smile of satisfaction. ‘Both mobile and computer are clean – no current social media accounts, dating websites, porn, gambling sites, nothing.’

‘You’re kidding,’ said David, looking up from his own computer. ‘That’s not possible. Surely there must be something – he’s thirty-three. He must be on social media. I’m ten years older than him and I’m on it.’

‘He had a Facebook account but he hasn’t bothered with it for well over a year. There’s not much of interest on his wall, mostly comments about football games, some sports clips taken off the web. He rarely posted on it. He had four friends. I contacted them and one has closed his account altogether, one knew him through football and two attended the same school as him. Nobody has heard from him in ages.’

‘And what guy doesn’t have some porn on his computer?’ David muttered.

Anna shook her head. ‘He’s squeaky clean. Mainly visits sports and news websites, technology sites, forums about sport. I went through his deleted history too – nothing.’

Robyn found it difficult to believe. Henry had had a life before Lauren. He hadn’t lived like a monk. And surely there’d been friends, acquaintances and other women in his life? He wouldn’t have shut himself away and only watched sport. It didn’t add up. Maybe he’d deliberately kept off such websites in case Lauren found out, and instead accessed them from a different computer. He was a man who kept secrets and who told lies; he’d be able to cover his trail if he had been accessing sites he didn’t want his wife to know about. No, Henry Gregson wasn’t as morally pure as he made out, she was sure of it.

Anna continued. ‘He used WhatsApp messaging from his mobile. The details are in the file along with all the calls he made and received. That’s Liam Carrington’s number.’ She indicated another number, highlighted in green. ‘That’s Carrington’s partner’s number – Ella. He rings or messages them regularly. He’s godfather to their child, isn’t he?’

‘Yes. Liam Carrington said Gregson took that duty seriously and even looked after Astra on weekends. I expect that’s why he phoned them so frequently,’ said Robyn, running her finger down the list. ‘Have you identified all these numbers?’

‘All but that one,’ said Anna, indicating the number. ‘The tech department say it’s a pay-as-you-go phone and it isn’t operating any more.’

Robyn tapped the number with one finger. ‘Gregson rang this number the morning of the fourteenth at ten past ten. And it appears to have rung him several times during the last fortnight.’

‘Six times in total, and we can’t throw any light on who owns the mobile, guv.’

Robyn tutted. ‘This is ringing alarm bells. Pay-as-you-go numbers that are suddenly no longer in use seem highly suspicious to me.’

David spoke up. ‘Might be a girlfriend’s phone.’

Robyn’s face pulled into a grimace. ‘You could be right. Maybe his whole goody-goody image is a front. No prints on that mobile?’

‘Only his.’

Anna interjected with a slight cough. ‘Lauren Gregson is a big Snapchat user. She’s got a Facebook account but she only uses it these days to play games. Looks like she used it far more before she met Henry. Posts trail off about eighteen months ago.’

‘Glean much from her account?’ Robyn asked.

‘Only that she had several boyfriends before Henry – six of them in the three years she was using Facebook. She has loads of friends on Snapchat.’

‘Stick with it. See what else you can learn. Mitz?’

‘I’ve just got off the phone with a chap from the Forestry Commission. There’s been no deer culling anywhere on Cannock Chase recently. He says that’s not part of the Chase they tend to shoot in, especially given the Gruffalo Trail is in the vicinity. And it’s unlikely a hunter would be in that area. The official was quite clear on rules and regulations on the Chase. Moreover, they definitely don’t use .455 cartridges.’

Robyn’s nostrils flared as she breathed out noisily. ‘I think we can unequivocally say Gregson was murdered.’ She rose and stood in front of the whiteboard, rubbed out ‘accidental death’.

‘Keep digging?’ asked David.

She waved a finger at him. ‘You got it. Anyone know where Matt is?’

‘Yoxall. He’s verifying Liam Carrington’s story. Think he also planned on buying some juicy steaks at the butcher’s while he was there. I put in my order too. You want anything bringing back, guv?’ David grinned.

Robyn smiled back. Sometimes a little light-heartedness did them all good. ‘Only evidence pointing to our killer,’ she replied.

‘I’ve got something interesting on Libby Gregson too,’ said Anna. ‘Unlike her brother, she’s very active on Facebook. She’s got over two hundred friends, most of whom live in or around Stoke, and several who were work colleagues. She’s big on selfies. She must post pictures of herself at least twice a day. She never mentions her mother in any of her status updates. They’re usually about television programmes, celebs, magazines or funnies from the Internet. She discusses various shows and has a laugh with her girlfriends. She’s also into tattoos. Recently – the last six months – she’s been posting pictures of the tattoos she’s had done all over her body. Some of the pictures were taken down from the site due to complaints, and she fired off angrily at the so-called friends who reported them as pornographic.’ Anna handed over a printout taken from Facebook. ‘That’s the latest one.’

Robyn looked at the pictures of a semi-naked Libby, back to the camera and wearing only a thong. Her back was a collage of red, black and blue stars and swirls that started at the base of her shoulder blade and travelled over her hips and buttocks and down the back of her legs. There was a large tattoo of a skull with angel wings across her spine, and under it the word ‘Mother’. Anna pointed to a photograph, showing the underside of Libby’s left forearm, and the fresh tattoo of a handgun shooting flowers.

Robyn looked up at Anna, who nodded. ‘Might be something. Might be nothing.’ Robyn had hauled in a suspect during the investigation into missing girls earlier that year because the man had hunting tattoos on his body and she was searching for a man calling himself Hunter. It had been the wrong call to make, and she wasn’t keen to repeat the mistake. The tattoos might have no relevance. However, they proved Libby had another side to her personality and was not the put-upon and obedient daughter she painted herself to be. She’d posted this photograph late Monday afternoon, before Henry was shot.

‘Either way, we’ll need to talk to her again. Anything on Tarik?’

Anna nodded. ‘I think so. There’s a Tarik Akar who’s one of her friends on Facebook. He’s a car mechanic in the centre of Hanley – works for Mike’s Motors. Attended the same secondary school as Libby and Henry. Married. Got a younger brother and a younger sister, both of whom went to the same school.’

‘Look into their backgrounds before we go dashing off to Stoke-on-Trent to interview them both.’

She turned her attention back to the list of numbers and began studying the dates and times of the calls. The buzzing of her mobile broke her concentration.

‘Carter,’ she said, writing as she spoke.

‘It’s Emma Moore, Aiden’s mum.’ Her voice was quiet. ‘Can you come over? Aiden told me why he thought the Gruffalo was hiding in the bushes. He said it was frightened of the man in the car. He also said the Gruffalo was wearing shoes and trousers. DI Carter, I think he might have seen the person who killed that man.’