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‘When’s he coming up to Yorkshire?’
    ‘They’re sending him all the reports and he anticipates starting preliminary interviews next week. Obviously they want to get on with it now you’re fit and back on duty.’
    Thackeray took a deep breath. Fit, he thought, was a relative concept. ‘Right,’ he said again as Longley hung up without further comment.
    They would waste no time now, and he wondered whether he or Longley would still have careers by the summer. There was no doubt in his own mind that if the Chief Constable and the senior officers at County Headquarters wanted either of them out of the force they would be able to justify it to this outside investigator: Longley seemed to have inexplicably left a vulnerable child unprotected; he himself had thrown away a life-time’s training in an attempt to protect Laura. He had never regretted that decision, made in the heart-stopping heat of the moment, but he knew that if he had gone by the book the resulting shoot-out might have been avoided and the life of a man might have been saved. He shifted uneasily in his chair, jarred by the now familiar stab of pain from the wound in his back. He and Laura could also very easily have died that day, he thought, and maybe ACC Richards from Birmingham would find that a mitigating factor. Or maybe not.
    He got up with Amos Athertons’s report in his hand and walked slowly through to the main CID room, feeling old. Most of the desks were empty, the detectives already deployed on inquiries around the canal area, but Sergeant Kevin Mower glanced up from his computer screen, with questions in his eyes.
    ‘You need to read this,’ Thackeray said, dropping the report onto Mower’s desk. ‘She was beaten, stabbed and thendrowned. I’m organising a briefing for two o’clock. We need to get a murder inquiry on the road, even if we don’t know who she is.’
    ‘There’ve been no missing person reports that fit in the whole of the county. I just checked again, guv,’ Mower said.
    ‘Identification is the first priority,’ Thackeray said. ‘But we mustn’t let potential witnesses by the canal off the hook. We need to check if anyone saw or heard anything that night. Door-to-door, though that’s a relative concept down there. Most of those buildings are empty, and those that aren’t are offices closed at night. But there’s the houseboats.’
    ‘Uniform are on to all that,’ Mower said.
    ‘What about the underwater search?’
    ‘Zilch,’ Mower said. ‘Used condoms and needles, which is more or less what you’d expect round there. It’s a quiet spot. But no sign of a handbag or a weapon.’
    ‘According to Amos we’re looking for a knife with a three-or four-inch blade, less than half an inch across, pointed, smooth edged. If they’ve had no joy in the water you’d better intensify the search along the bank. And I can’t believe a girl wouldn’t be carrying some sort of bag or purse. You may not carry ID as a matter of course, but everyone needs money.’
    ‘Maybe the motive was simply robbery,’ Mower said.
    Thackeray shook his head slowly. ‘She’d been hit and kicked in a sustained attack,’ he said. ‘Read the report on her injuries. You don’t do that just in the course of snatching a purse.’
    ‘Race then?’ Mower said, his face darkening. ‘There’s enough nutters out there these days who don’t like anyone a shade darker than they are.’
    ‘There are, but do they hang around a lonely towpath on the off-chance someone they don’t like will turn up? But you’re right, that’s another line of inquiry. We’ll have to see what we can pick up amongst the right-wing racist groups. But ID is the first priority. Until we know who she is we can’t even begin to work out what she was doing down there in the first place. It’s not somewhere you’d choose for a stroll on a dark winter night with no coat on. Remind the search teams that she was distinctly under-dressed for the conditions, will