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‘No, thank you.’ Charlesworth cleared his throat. ‘Give it to him in a takeaway cup, please,’ he said to the assistant pouring Dixon’s tea. ‘I’ll be in meeting room two.’

‘Yes, Sir.’

No Deborah Potter this time, although the press officer was there. Dixon sometimes wondered if Charlesworth and Vicky Thomas were joined at the hip.

‘You had a journalist sniffing around the exhumation last night, I gather,’ said Charlesworth, when Dixon sat down. ‘Tipped off, I suppose. Not by one of us, I trust.’

‘Certainly not by one of my team.’

‘And the body is another murder victim?’

‘Roger Poland has confirmed strangulation as the cause of death.’

‘And three makes a serial killer,’ said Vicky Thomas. ‘It’s not a good visual, someone running around killing old people in their own homes, and even care homes.’

‘Look, Nick, I’ve spoken to my opposite number at Dorset. He has every confidence in you and your regional task force to clear this up.’

Dixon waited. He was enjoying watching Charlesworth squirm far too much to give him an easy way out.

‘They’re stretched as it is, in Dorset.’

‘Aren’t we all, Sir.’

‘Well, quite. But the reality is there’s going to be no reinforcements, not from that quarter anyway.’

‘From which quarter then, Sir?’

‘None, as it happens.’ Charlesworth gave an apologetic shrug. ‘I know, sixteen people is not where we’d like to be on an investigation of this size, but we are where we are.’

‘And it is what it is, Sir,’ said Dixon, with just a hint of sarcasm.

‘Tell me about this morning.’ Charlesworth had clearly decided a change of subject would get him off the hook.

‘An old man with dementia at a care home in Shepton Mallet. She got in and left without killing him. She was wearing gloves, so there’s nothing for Scientific and there’ll be God knows how many people’s DNA all over the place, so we can forget that.’

‘Nothing to learn from that then,’ said Vicky Thomas.

‘On the contrary, we’ve learned a great deal. These victims are not being selected at random; they’re being killed for a specific reason – a secret they share, a secret they’re dying for. Except George Sampson, who can’t remember it anyway.’

‘So, his dementia saved his life,’ said Charlesworth.

‘Some might say it took it long ago, Sir,’ muttered Dixon.

The briefing had not gone well, Dixon left wondering which groan was louder: the one that came when he told those assembled there’d be no help coming from Dorset, or the one that greeted the news that all of the witnesses would need to be reinterviewed, looking for a connection between Deirdre Baxter, Michael Allam, and now Thomas Fowler and George Sampson.

Mark Pearce wasn’t a happy bunny either, another set of traffic cameras in Shepton Mallet to search, but at least the footage of the car outside the care home gave him a starting point. A couple more community support officers had come forward to offer their help too.

‘There’s only sixteen of us!’

Dixon wasn’t entirely sure he recognised the voice, but he appreciated the sentiment. And it would be down to fifteen if and when he found the leak. One of the Devon lot had tipped Warren Hugget off that there was an exhumation going on, and he was going to make damn sure he found out who it was.

He was standing in front of the whiteboards, his arms folded tightly across his chest, when Jane appeared next to him.

‘Where did you get to this morning?’ he asked.

‘Incident rooms don’t run themselves, you know.’

‘We need to have that chat about you going on maternity leave.’

‘I can’t yet.’

‘Yes, you can. We checked the rules, remember? You get fifteen months in total, but a maximum of twelve after the baby’s born, so you’re supposed to go three months before your due date, which is now. The longer you leave it, the less time you’ll get.’

‘All right, all right. I’ll go at the end of this case.’

‘It might go on for months.’

‘Then we’ll take it a day at a time.’

Dixon was pushing his luck, he knew that. Jane could be stubborn and her fuse had been getting shorter the deeper she had got into her pregnancy. Not that they had ever fallen out. He knew the line, and that it kept moving.

‘Just promise me you’ll go home early today. Four o’clock at the latest. And get some sleep.’

‘I will.’

‘I’ll put Monty in your car when I go off with Lou, then you’ll have to take him home and feed him.’

Are sens

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