He had managed to find a copy of the previous day’s Daily Mail and having bitten back the bile – he had only been looking for a report on the Spurs – Villa game anyway – had taken it to the café to read over breakfast. The match report had been brief and uninformative, probably because there was no scope to make any comment on illegal immigrants or dole scroungers, but flicking through the paper he had come across a double-page article written by Adam Chambers’ girlfriend.

Natalie Bennett had been charged with attempting to pervert the course of justice. Although there was little doubt she had lied, the charges had been dropped following her boyfriend’s acquittal. In the article, beneath a caption that read ‘Picking up the Pieces’, she movingly described her efforts to rebuild her life after the trauma she and Adam had endured. There was a photo of her smiling bravely.

If Thorne had been served his breakfast by then, he would have heaved it up across the table.

Even more disturbingly, Bennett mentioned that she and Chambers were currently working on a book that would ‘lift the lid’ on the abysmal failings of the police investigation and in which the full extent of their suffering would be revealed. Thorne read on, thinking things could not get any worse, until he spotted that the book was being co-written by a hack journalist and true-crime writer called Nick Maier. Thorne had had dealings with Maier in the past, and the thought of him profiting in any way from what had happened to Andrea Keane turned his stomach still further.

By the time he had thrown the paper away, his appetite had all but gone and the call from Fraser killed it altogether.

Now, he was stepping gingerly through a crime scene, in the apartment from which Candela Bernal had fallen to her death the night before.

‘You seen many jumpers?’ Fraser asked.

‘She didn’t jump, Peter.’

‘Just saying. They take their glasses off, did you know that? I saw it in an old episode of Inspector Morse.’

‘She didn’t wear glasses,’ Thorne said, ‘and she didn’t fucking jump.’

‘I know, OK? Just making conversation, Christ . . .’

The sliding door that led to the balcony was open and there were more officers working outside. A blue tarpaulin that had been secured to the railings snapped and fluttered in the wind.

‘Why was nobody watching this place?’ Thorne asked. ‘We told her there would be protection.’

Fraser raised his hands. ‘Nothing to do with me, mate.’

‘Well, somebody screwed up,’ Thorne said. He considered everything Silcox and Mullenger had told him back in London. ‘Or looked the other way.’

‘Come on, we couldn’t have guessed it would be so quick.’

‘Couldn’t we?’ Thorne was as angry with himself as he was with Fraser or any of his colleagues. ‘Langford probably sussed it when she told him she had to go home early. He might even have seen her put the champagne glass in her bag.’

‘Look, none of this was my idea, all right?’

Thorne moved away, but Fraser followed, a pace or two behind, his hands stuffed sulkily into the pockets of his plastic bodysuit. Thorne stepped across a local scene of crime officer who was on his hands and knees, scraping at the carpet. The officer muttered something in Spanish that was almost certainly not ‘Good morning and how are you?’ as Thorne walked over to where the two suitcases lay near the door.

‘She was trying to leave,’ Thorne said.

‘Looks that way.’ Fraser moved alongside him, nodded at the door. ‘No sign of forced entry, so maybe she knew him.’

‘You should check with all the local taxi companies.’

‘Wouldn’t she just have taken her own car?’

‘Too easy to trace,’ Thorne said. ‘She’d have known Langford has friends in high places. Including police officers.’

‘I don’t know what you’re trying to suggest, mate,’ Fraser said.

‘I’m not suggesting anything.’

‘One or two of the local boys might be a bit dodgy, fair enough, but . . .’

Thorne had already stopped listening to him. He was staring at a small, glass-topped side table next to the sofa. There was an empty wine glass and a beer bottle minus a label. In the ashtray, dark gobbets of rolled-up paper lay scattered among the lipstick-stained cigarette butts.

‘Langford did this himself,’ Thorne said.

‘Come again?’

‘He killed her.’

‘No way,’ Fraser said. ‘You’ve said it yourself, he doesn’t get involved in the messy stuff.’

‘Messy’ was the only way to describe the scene on the street seventeen floors below. By the time Thorne had got there, the area had been sealed off and hidden from the public, but there was still a good deal of cleaning up to be done. They would be lucky if there was enough of Candela Bernal left for a post-mortem.

‘He’s rattled,’ Thorne said. ‘His girlfriend does the dirty on him and he takes it personally. He’s already had the job on me go wrong and he’s fired up enough to do this one himself.’

‘I can’t see it.’

Thorne pulled Fraser across to the small table and pointed. ‘He had a drink with her, OK? Or sat down and helped himself to one after he’d killed her.’

‘Jesus . . .’

Thorne remembered the terror on the girl’s face when they confronted her, and what she had said about cops and villains. The difficulty in telling one from the other. She had not been given much of a choice in the end, but she had still picked the wrong side. ‘Make sure you get prints off that bottle,’ he said. ‘Match them with the ones from the glass Candela brought in.’

‘Doesn’t matter if his prints are all over the place,’ Fraser said. ‘This is his girlfriend’s flat.’

‘But he’d never been here, remember?’

‘Yeah, but the only person who can corroborate that is the girl and she’s pavement pizza, so what’s the point?’

There was a sudden burst of laughter from the balcony.

‘The Spanish are even more hard-arsed about this stuff than we are,’ Fraser said. ‘Some of the jokes.’

‘Just get the prints.’ Thorne turned and began unzipping his bodysuit as he walked quickly towards the door.

‘Where are you off to?’ Fraser asked, two steps behind him again.

‘A bit more sightseeing,’ Thorne said.

However hard that might otherwise be.

There were solid metal gates at the end of the driveway, and from what Thorne could remember from the helicopter pictures he had been shown, it was about a quarter of a mile from them to the house itself. Thorne could not see any security cameras, but he did not much care if he was seen anyway.

He rang the bell and waited. Rang again, then stepped back and walked a few yards along the perimeter fence. Densely cultivated firs obscured the view, so he moved back to the gates, pushing the sweat out of his eyes with the heels of his hands. He pressed the bell one more time, then leaned down to the speaker that was built into a concrete post. He had no idea if anyone was listening.

‘You made another mistake, Alan,’ he said. He could hear nothing but the low buzz of power lines overhead and the humming of cicadas. ‘Your last one . . .’

He turned at the sound of a vehicle approaching and watched a white VW Golf coming around the steep bend that led to the villa. The car slowed when the driver saw him, then stopped altogether. Thorne took a few casual steps and recognised the man he had seen watching him on his first two nights in Mijas. The man who may or may not be working for Alan Langford.

Thorne and the driver looked at each other for ten seconds before Thorne began walking quickly towards the car. The gravel spat as the driver immediately threw the Golf into a three-point turn. Thorne started to run, but there was never any chance of him catching it. He made a mental note of the number plate and was repeating it to himself as the Golf disappeared around the corner and his phone rang.

It was Holland.

‘How did it go in Nottingham, Dave?’

‘Chris Talbot is definitely our man,’ Holland said. ‘Was our man, whatever. But listen, there’s a photo you need to see.’ He told Thorne about the rugby picture, about the man whose face he had recognised.

Thorne felt what might have been a bead of sweat, or an insect crawling across the nape of his neck. He had already forgotten the VW’s number plate. ‘It’s not that strange, is it? Considering the team.’ He began walking back towards his car.

‘Not if it was just that, but Sonia Murray called from Wakefield. They did a random search of Jeremy Grover’s cell last week and found a mobile phone.’

‘Last week? So why are we only hearing about this now?’

Holland explained standard HMP protocol in such circumstances, as it had been explained to him by Murray. The phone had immediately been sent to the prison’s security department in case it contained pictures of officers or keys, and from there to an outside technical support unit. The techies had extracted data from the SIM card, including the numbers of all incoming and outgoing calls, and had then passed the information on to Murray.

‘If she hadn’t been on the ball, we might never have heard about it,’ Holland said. ‘But she thought we might be interested in the calls made and received in the few days before Monahan was killed. And on the day . . .’

‘You’ve checked them out?’

‘One number came up repeatedly.’

‘Whose?’

Holland told him. The same man he had seen in the photograph at Alison Hobbs’ house. A mobile registered in his wife’s name.

‘Grover sent a text the day he killed Monahan,’ Holland said. ‘And he was called back a few hours later. The same thing happened the day after Cook was killed.’

Thorne reached the car and leaned against it for a few seconds.

‘There’s your jungle drums,’ Holland said.

Thorne opened the door and climbed in, turned on the ignition and waited for the cold air. He ran through conversations from two months before. Let the pieces fall into place.

‘Sir? Tom . . . ?’

‘We use him to get Langford,’ Thorne said. He was thinking aloud, but he knew it was the best chance they had. The only chance. ‘We can use him, but we need to get him here, all right?’

‘How do we do that?’

‘Piece of piss,’ Thorne said.

Suddenly he knew exactly what needed to be done. And he knew just the man to do it.