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‘I’m with Tilly on this, boss. It does sound like a waste of time,’ Poe said.

‘Oh, it’s a massive waste of time, Poe,’ Flynn agreed. ‘But she wants you there and she’s running the show.’

‘Fine. What time?’

‘Ten o’clock.’

‘We’ll be there.’

‘Good. And Tilly, please don’t boo tomorrow.’

Chapter 32

‘We’ll need a new list, Poe,’ Bradshaw said. ‘We need to know about everyone who lives at those addresses, not just the names ANL supplied to us. It’s possible that the two logos were a present for someone. The person who ordered them might not be who they were intended for.’

Poe nodded. ‘And if they were a present, it could explain why they weren’t delivered to the home address – they wanted them to be a surprise.’

‘I’ll log onto the Police National Computer and the electoral roll.’

When Bradshaw finished adding anyone who lived in the same house as those people on the ‘collect at depot’ list, they had a final tally of seventy names. She spent an hour doing what she called ‘snap profiles’ – basic information such as gender, date of birth, ethnicity, any history of criminal behaviour – then Blu Tacked everything to the murder wall.

‘I’ll go through it first, Tilly,’ Poe said.

He started by putting a red line through all the females. Poe had seen the killer on the CCTV at Fiskin’s Food Hall, and although his face had been obscured, he was very definitely male. And he’d moved like a younger man so Poe felt confident in putting a line through anyone over the age of sixty.

That left eighteen.

Two of the men in the right age range were Asian and one was black. Nightingale’s team had interviewed every member of John Bull Haulage and all the bookmen who’d been seen entering the office had been white. Bradshaw added that all research on serial killers suggested they kept to their own ethnic groups when selecting victims. Poe put a red line through them.

Fifteen.

Bradshaw took over. One of the men was in the Royal Navy, had been overseas for three months and wasn’t due back until April.

Fourteen.

Another was ex-army. He’d lost an arm in an IED incident in Afghanistan. Poe crossed him off – using a garrotte needed two hands.

Thirteen.

Using a database Poe didn’t recognise, Bradshaw discovered that one of the men had spent Christmas in London and was yet to return and another was an Australian who had flown back to Melbourne for the Boxing Day test match. She highlighted them both on her screen – her version of Poe’s red pen.

Eleven.

Bradshaw wanted to reduce the list further by using her rudimentary profiles, but Poe stopped her.

Two hours later and Bradshaw had gone deep into the online lives of the remaining eleven. The murder wall was almost full.

Poe stared at the information she’d gathered. Some of the people on the list were active on social media, others barely touched it. Some took their online security seriously, others may as well have posted photographs of their birth certificates and bank accounts on Facebook.

His gut told him the man they were looking for would be naturally secretive, but a lack of social media presence wasn’t a safe way to reduce the list further. If he was clever he’d have taken steps to blend in online. Bradshaw maintained countless social media avatars, all of which could withstand scrutiny by a third party; there was no reason their killer couldn’t have done the same. A bland profile full of fluff and cat videos would disguise his secretive nature without him ever posting anything of significance.

On that basis it could have been any of them.

Eleven names.

One killer.

Chapter 33