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Road around eight and travelled into Brighton town centre by bus with two of her flatmates, Jo and Nicole while the other, Francine remained in the flat with her boyfriend. They visited the Pump House, a busy pub in the popular Lanes area of the city centre and stayed there for two drinks before moving on to the Heist Bar in West Street, where they remained until eleven o’clock before moving down the road towards the seafront and into a nightclub called Havana Bay.
    As usual, the girls entered the club together but it was generally agreed that if one of the group met a boy or some of their friends from university, they would split up and make their own way back to the flat. Around midnight, Sarah bumped into a group of people she knew from her Business Studies course and decided to join them. According to statements from the small number of clubbers they managed to track down and interview so far, Sarah left Havana Bay on her own at two in the morning as she had fallen out with the boy she fancied when he got drunk and fell asleep on one of the ‘chill-out’ settees.
    Due to a combination of faulty town centre CCTV cameras and bad street lighting, they could only track her movements from the top of West Street and down North Street but lost her at the Steine, one of the main thoroughfares in and out of the city with traffic heading into Brighton, north to London or east to Lewes.
    From there, Sarah could have walked the mile or so to her flat through a seedy part of town with more than its fair share of drug users and prostitutes, caught a taxi from a large stand at East Street, where five months earlier she collected her Drunk and Disorderly charge or jumped on a late night bus which at that time of the morning, were running every half-hour.
    Teams were currently canvassing bus garages and taxi ranks with Sarah’s picture, door-to-door teams were talking to residents and they were analysing CCTV cameras all along the Lewes Road and up to her flat in Milton Road, but nothing seemed to contradict his assertion that she was abducted shortly after arriving at the Steine. He was about to go downstairs and relieve Constable Graham when he heard a noise behind him.
    ‘Find anything seedy, Inspector , something you can tell to that gaggle of scum-bag reporters who’ve been hanging outside my house since Monday morning to convince them, if any convincing was required, that it was Sarah’s own fault that she was raped and murdered?’
    Henderson took a deep breath before he spoke. At six foot-two, he towered over the smaller figure of Owen Robson and took a step back from what might be regarded as an intimating stance. ‘I wouldn’t do that Mr Robson as it wouldn’t serve your interests or mine. I am simply trying to understand more about your daughter. No-one is drawing any conclusions at this stage and we will not do so until we know more than we do at present.’
    ‘Yeah, but it won’t stop that lot,’ he said, jerking a thumb behind him, ‘from speculating. Will it?’
    ‘You’re right but in my experience it pays not to fight them but to get them on board and get them working for you.’
    ‘How the hell do I do that?’
    ‘Well, when they have little or no information to go on, they speculate, make it up if you will. So what you’ve got to do is plug that gap. Give them a few pictures and some facts about Sarah and they’ll publish them. Do it every few days and it’ll keep her in the news, otherwise she’ll soon be forgotten when the next economic crisis comes along or the drunken antics of some celebrity takes over the headlines.’
    ‘I know what you mean. These X-Factor people are never out of the news.’
    ‘If you think you’re wasting your time, you’d be amazed at the amount of people that come forward in a week or even a month after the start of a major enquiry, completely unaware of the hullaballoo that has been raging and offering an absolute nugget of information which suddenly turns all our