Beth went back to the list of missing persons and checked a month either side of her original parameters. The list yielded one possibility, but even they didn’t seem like a cast-iron certainty.

When she called the number of the person who’d reported the lady missing, the call was answered by a sleepy voice. Beth explained who she was and why she was calling so late. The man at the other end of the line perked up a little. A minute later Beth thanked him for his candid appraisal of his wife and ended the call.

The woman had been located at her sister’s house five days after he’d reported her missing. A week after that he came home from work to find most of his furniture and all her belongings had disappeared.

A quick check of their address yielded three treble nine calls from neighbours in the weeks before her disappearance. Each call had been made after the neighbours had heard a man shouting and a woman screaming.

Beth gave the woman a mental high-five. She’d escaped the clutches of a man who didn’t value her, freed herself from a life of terror and had possessed the courage to make a new start.

While pleased for the woman, Beth knew that it meant she’d drawn another blank unless the victim had been in the cellar a lot longer than Dr Hewson had stated. It was easy to cast the blame for her failure to name the victim onto the pathologist, but Beth wasn’t keen to believe he’d got it so wrong. Plus Max Cooper had only been away for six months, so it seemed unlikely that the body had been there before he’d gone on his world tour.

Hewson had covered his bases by not being specific and giving a wide parameter for the length of time the woman had been in the cellar. She’d extended the dates without success, which meant one of three things: the doctor was mistaken, the woman wasn’t local to Cumbria, or she hadn’t been missed by anyone.

If she’d been a tourist holidaying in the area, she’d have been missed when she hadn’t returned home. But with Cumbria as her last known position, her disappearance would have been flagged on the searches Beth had run.

Beth’s next thoughts were about who wouldn’t be reported missing. Homeless people were always moving about and were prone to vanish for weeks at a time before popping up somewhere else. Nobody on the streets would miss her, and if they did, they often weren’t the type to walk into a police station to discuss anything other than their personal conspiracy theories.

Even if she wasn’t homeless, the woman could otherwise be the kind of recluse who lived alone and shunned contact with other people. Already in Beth’s short career, she’d twice attended calls where a neighbour had been worried about an unusual smell. Upon breaking into the houses, they’d found decomposing bodies that had lain for at least a month. Without a body to create a smell, the neighbours had no reason to call the police about the pain in the backside who lived next door. They’d figure they’d just got lucky and had missed bumping into their crotchety neighbour.

Beth spent a few minutes looking at the missing persons’ reports from neighbouring counties and drawing up a list of possibilities. It seemed less likely than being local to Cumbria, but there was no other course of action she could think of right now, other than waiting for a result from the woman’s dental records.

By 10 p.m., she had a list of nine names which fit Hewson’s timescale. They could be called in the morning though. Even with the urgency of the case, Beth knew she’d get far better responses if she didn’t wake up people to ask if their loved ones had returned home.

There was nothing further to be found in the missing persons’ reports. Or in the ones that had been filed about the people they’d spoken to when canvassing the area for witnesses.

Beth tried not to slam the office door behind her when she left, or to stomp her feet in frustration at her lack of progress as she walked to her car. She achieved the first.

The bottle of wine in her fridge called to her and she planned on having a large glass. To hell with Dr Hewson and his warning, she was a grown woman, and if she wanted a glass of wine, she’d damned well have one.