“Can you tell me–” she began, just as he began to ask her a question.

“You’re from–”

“Oh, sorry–”

“I was going to say, you’re up from Bournemouth, aren’t you?” Olbeck asked.

“That’s right. I grew up there.”

“I thought that’s where people went to retire.”

Kate grinned. “Pretty much. There’s wasn’t a lot of, shall we say, life when I was growing up.” She paused. “Still, we had the beach. Where are you from?”

“London,” said DS Olbeck, briefly. There was a pause while he waited to join the dual carriageway. “Nowhere glamorous. Just the outskirts, really. Ruislip, Middlesex. How are you finding the move to the West Country?”

“Fine so far.”

“Have you got family around here?

Kate was growing impatient with the small talk. “No, no one around here,” she said. “Can I ask you about the case?”

“Of course.”

“I know it’s a murder and kidnap case–”

“Yes. The child – baby – belongs to the Fullmans. Nick Fullman is a very wealthy entrepreneur, made most of his cash in property development. He got married about a year ago – to one of those sort of famous people.”

“How do you mean?” Kate asked.

“Oh you know, the sort of Z-list celebrity that keeps showing up in Heat magazine. Her name’s Casey Bright. Well, Casey Fullman now. Appeared in Okay when they got married, showing you round their lovely home, you know the sort of thing.”

Kate smiled. “I get the picture.”

She wouldn’t have pegged DS Olbeck for a gossip mag reader, but then people often weren’t what they seemed.

“And the murder?”

“The nanny, Dita Olgweisch. Looks incidental to the kidnapping at this point, but you never know. What is known is that the baby is missing and as it – he’s – only three months old, you can imagine the kind of thing we’re dealing with here.”

“Yes.” Kate was silent for a moment. A three-month-old baby…memories threatened to surface and she pushed them away. “So on the face of it, we’re looking at the baby was snatched, the nanny interrupted whoever it was, and she was killed?”

“Like you say, on the surface, that seems to be what’s happened. We’ll know more soon. We’ll be there in,” he glanced at the sat nav on the windscreen, “fifteen minutes or so.”

They were off the motorway now and into the countryside. Looking out of the window, Kate noted the ploughed fields, shorn of the autumn stubble, the skeletal shapes of the trees. It was a grey January day, the sky like a flat blanket the colour of nothing. The worst time of year, she thought, everything dead, shut down for the winter, months until spring.

The car slowed, turned into a driveway, and continued through formidable iron gates which were opened for them by a uniformed officer. After they drove through, Kate looked back to see the gates swung shut behind them. She noted the high wooden fence that ran alongside the road, the CCTV camera on the gatepost. The driveway wound though dripping trees and opened out into a courtyard at the front of the house.

“Looks like security is a priority,” she said to her companion as he pulled the car up by the front door.

He raised his eyebrows. “Clearly not enough of a priority.”

“Well, we’ll see,” said Kate.

They both got out of the car. There was another uniformed officer by the front door, a pale redhead whose nose had reddened in the raw air. He was stamping his feet and swinging his arms but stopped abruptly when Kate and Olbeck reached him.

“DCI Anderton here yet?” said Olbeck.

“Yes sir. He’s inside, in the kitchen. Just go straight through the hallway.”

They stepped inside. The hallway was cavernous, tiled in chilly white stone, scuffed and marked now with the imprint of shoes and boots. Kate looked around. A staircase split in two and flowed around the upper reaches of the hallway to the first floor of the house. There was an enormous light shade suspended from the ceiling, a tangled mass of glass tubing and metal filaments. It had probably cost more than her flat, but she thought it hideous all the same. The house was warm, too warm; the underfloor heating was obviously at full blast, but there was an atmosphere of frigidity nonetheless. Perhaps it was the glossy white floor, the high ceilings, the general air of too much space. A Philip Starke chair stood against the wall, looking as though it had been carved out of ice.

“Mark? That you? Through here.”

They followed the shout through into the kitchen, big on an industrial scale. It opened out into a glass-walled conservatory, which overlooked a terrace leading down to a clipped and manicured lawn. Detective Chief Inspector Anderton stood by a cluster of leather sofas where a woman was sitting, crouching forward, her long blonde hair dipping towards the floor. Kate looked around her surreptitiously. The place stank of money, new money: wealth just about dripped from the ceilings. It must be a kidnapping. Now, Kate, she chided herself. No jumping to conclusions.

She had only met the Chief Inspector once before, at her interview. He was a grey man: steel grey hair, dark grey eyes, grey suit. Easy to dismiss, at first.

“Ah, DS Redman,” he said as they both approached. “Welcome. Hoping to catch up with you later in my office, but we’ll have to see how things go. You can see how things are here.”

He gave her a firm handshake, holding her gaze for a moment. She was surprised at the sudden tug of her lower belly, a pulse that vanished almost as soon as she’d registered it. A little shaken, it took her a moment to collect herself. The other two officers had begun talking to the blonde woman on the sofa. Kate joined them.

Casey Fullman was a tiny woman, very childlike in spite of the bleached hair, the breast implants and the false nails. Kate noted the delicate bones of her wrist and ankles. Casey had bunchy cheeks, smooth and round like the curve of a peach, a tip-tilted nose and large blue eyes. These last were bloodshot, tears glistening along the edge of her reddened eyelids.

“I don’t know,” she was saying as Kate joined them. Her voice was high, and she spoke with a gasp that could have been tears but might be habitual. “I don’t know. I didn’t hear anything and when I woke up, Dita,” she drew in her breath, “Dita wasn’t there. She would normally be there with a bottle and Ch- and Ch–”

She broke down entirely, dropping her head down to her bare knees. There was a moment of silence while Kate watched the ends of Casey’s long hair touch the floor.

Anderton began to utter some soothing words. Kate looked around, her eye attracted by a movement outside on the terrace. A man was walking up and down, talking into a mobile phone, his free hand gesticulating wildly. As Kate watched, he flipped the phone closed and turned towards the house. He was young, good-looking and, somewhat incongruously given the early hour, dressed in a suit.

“Sorry about that, I had to take it,” said Nick Fullman as he entered the room. Kate mentally raised her eyebrows, wondering at a man who prioritised a phone call, presumably a business matter, over comforting his wife after their baby son had been kidnapped. Not necessarily a kidnapping, Kate, stop jumping to conclusions. She thought she saw an answering disapproval in Olbeck’s face.

Anderton introduced his colleagues. Nick Fullman shook hands with them both, rather to Kate’s surprise, and then finally sat down next to his sobbing wife.

“Come on, Case,” he said, pulling her up and encircling her with one arm. “Try and keep it together. The police are here to help.”

Casey put shaking fingers up to her mouth. She appeared to be trying to control her tears, taking in deep, shuddering breaths.

“Perhaps you’d like a cup of tea?” said Olbeck. He caught Kate’s eye, and she immediately looked away. Don’t you bloody dare ask me to make it. He looked around rather helplessly. “Is there anyone who could , er–”