BECAUSE OF RHIANNON Lloyd’s illustrious background, and the way her life had been cut short in such a tragic way, there were many members of her family who thought the funeral should be held as soon as possible. Her older sister, Bethan, argued that the media coverage was going to dominate the proceedings and it was probably best if it was attended by only the close family, and then they could hold a memorial service two or three months later. There were other family members – uncles, aunts and cousins – who agreed and thought that perhaps Friday was not unreasonable if it could be organized in time.

But Gavin Lloyd disagreed, arguing that to go through what seemed like the entire proceedings twice would be unfair on the children, not least himself.

Bethan wanted to avoid family squabbles over what was after all a heartrending and devastating time for the family, but she argued fiercely with her brother-in-law because she felt he was being unfeeling and callous about the memorial service. And although she wouldn’t admit it, buried in Bethan’s mind was a desire for a more controlled service, attended by many well-known artists, writers and opera singers, people her sister had championed during her time with the Welsh Arts Council.

But Gavin Lloyd dug in his heels; he was adamant he wasn’t going to go through it all a second time. This succeeded in bringing bitter family resentments back to the surface as Bethan threw in her brother-in-law’s face the loan from her father which he had never paid back.

That was when he told her about his wife’s affair with Mark Yalding. At first she didn’t believe him, but because she had never truly liked her brother-in-law, especially since he had callously rooked her father, she understood how her sister had sought comfort in the arms of another man. It also helped her to understand, albeit resentfully, her brother-in-law’s reluctance to hold a memorial service sometime later. And when the coroner’s office indicated that a Friday funeral might be difficult because of the thorough post mortem that was required, the funeral was put off for seven days and would be held on the following Tuesday.

Bethan had no option but to accept these plans, but it was with deep bitterness. She still argued, clinging to the wreckage, saying the circumstances of her sister’s tragic death were obvious. Rhiannon had been wounded by a shot in the back as she ran upstairs, managed to crawl into the bedroom, where she was shot once in the back of the head. It didn’t need a pathologist or the coroner to tell her that.

Following the discovery of Rhiannon Lloyd’s body, the forensic team went over the Lloyds’ house with a fine-tooth comb, but found no traces of fingerprints, other than those of Rhiannon and Gavin Lloyd. The handle of the back door had been wiped clean, possibly by the intruder’s glove, and although small fibres were meticulously collected and bagged from various parts of the house, very little evidence seemed to emerge from their search.

When Lambert met Hughie John at the forensic lab and heard his report, he sighed and shook his head. Then he spotted a glint in the forensic scientist’s eye, prior to a wide grin.

‘We found grey fibres in the house that looked as if they had come from inside a car, probably came off the killer’s shoe. We checked the victim’s Land Rover and they didn’t match. But I’ve been saving the good news till last.’

‘Don’t tell me you found a print which will match those of someone with a criminal record?’

‘Not that good. But we did find this on the driveway leading up to the house.’

Hughie handed him a photograph, showing several black dollops on the gravel, about the size of a table tennis ball. ‘Someone’s car has a pretty bad oil leak. Again, we checked the victim’s Land Rover, and it didn’t come from that. So that only leaves your Merc, Harry.’

‘I hope it’s not from mine. The car’s only two years old.’

‘Yes, a nice motor. It’s all right for some.’

‘Recession bargain, Hughie. Couldn’t resist it.’

‘Still, you’ll need to check that this oil’s not from your car.’

As soon as Lambert was outside the lab, he moved his car from his parking space and checked the ground. There was no oil spillage. But just to make certain, he took it to a garage to get it checked out.

It was clean.

First thing on Wednesday morning Lambert briefed his team, which had now been increased by four male uniform PCs and two female. He told them his priority was to get Alan Hughes’s van checked for oil leaks, and he wanted it examined thoroughly, up on a garage ramp. He didn’t think for one minute McNeil or Hughes would be cooperative, so a warrant was needed. He also instructed Wallace and Jones to revisit McNeil’s house to get the names and addresses of the vigilantes belonging to PASO, who would all need to be interviewed, and the other three named sex offenders needed to be interrogated as soon as possible.

Although confident he had a good team, Lambert sensed a feeling of pessimism in them. It was something he couldn’t quite put his finger on. Perhaps it was something to do with the weather. Early that morning, prior to the briefing, the weather had deteriorated suddenly, the day plunged into darkness, and the hills acquired a familiarly satanic look that was morbidly fitting as heavy rain blanketed all of South Wales. And Lambert knew how dispiriting a day like this could be to those in the team who would be knocking on doors, encountering the hostility of the vigilantes, and took pains to motivate them, explaining how important their efforts were. But Lambert realized there was a half-heartedness about his leadership that he found difficult to conquer, almost as if he was going through the motions simply to prove to DCS Marden that he had the investigation well under control.

He knew what he was doing had to be done, but he also suspected it wasn’t going to achieve very much.

And the first confirmation of his doubts came towards the end of the dreary day as they discovered the fertilizer factory van didn’t leak oil. Then there came the news that most of the PASO members seemed to be angry and indignant enough to lobby their MPs, write irate letters to the newspapers and send furious emails to organizations such as the NSPCC, but showed no signs of remaining anything but law abiding.

By the time the week was almost over, Lambert’s team felt demoralized, even though they all knew the importance of elimination in any investigation. Just one glimmer of a result might have raised everyone’s spirits, especially as the newspapers were having a field day writing their insinuations of police incompetence. Which didn’t make Lambert’s life any easier as far as his relationship with DCS Clive Marden was concerned, who pestered him at every juncture, demanding a greater commitment from him, and once he even made a snide comment about wishing DI Ambrose wasn’t in Florida, even though on a case review basis Ambrose was only half as successful as Lambert.

What irritated Lambert most, however, was Marden referring to the other sex offenders as suspects. Lambert argued that they were far more likely to be victims, even though he himself had posited the vague possibility of one of them becoming a vengeance-seeking serial killer. And, as he pointed out, the reason it was proving difficult to discover their whereabouts was probably because they feared for their lives, knowing they were next on a serial killer’s list.

One of them, a man named Peter Brown, had fled to Birmingham, and was scraping a living by working for a firm of legal migrants offering cheap car washes. It was possible he could have driven from Birmingham at night. He was able to drive, but didn’t own a car and there was no record of him having hired one. He was scrubbed off the list.

The fifth sex offender was discovered living in a hostel in Cardiff, and as he was technically homeless he occasionally sold copies of Big Issue by day. Much of his time was spent drinking cheap booze in a Wetherspoon’s pub, where he talked nonsense to other problem drinkers. Although he wasn’t entirely destitute, he didn’t have far to fall to rock bottom. He was a highly unlikely suspect.

But the final sex offender, Randall Morris, was harder to trace. He had vanished from Tregaron, much to the relief of anyone who knew who he was and what he’d done, and had not been seen for about six months.

Out of all the sex offenders, it was Randall Morris who aroused most suspicion. Although all sex offenders were well practised at deviousness, Morris took it to a higher level. The son of an accountant, he married, had a family, and owned a sweetshop in Llanelli. Whenever a lone child entered his shop, he or she would often discover it was empty, the proprietor nowhere to be seen. A child in a sweetshop, faced with the prospect of free chocolate, will nine times out of ten succumb to temptation, especially if the likelihood of being caught is negligible. And Morris had it all worked out, having singled out the most vulnerable children, the ones he knew would find the prospect of facing their parents with a shoplifting charge too difficult to stomach. That was when he pounced from behind his curtain, where he had been watching the unsuspecting child pocketing confectionery.

After Morris was caught, he was given what the residents of Llanelli described as a ludicrously lenient sentence of three years. His wife divorced him and an exclusion order stopped him from seeing his children when he was released.

Morris then moved back to Tregaron, where he met and married an overweight and rather unattractive widow. But her attraction became apparent when years later social services discovered that she had an eight-year-old daughter who Morris had abused for four years. This time he was sentenced to seven years.

And now, more than eight years later, they hadn’t a clue where he was.

But on the Friday, the police press office circulated his picture to all the South Wales newspapers, and on the following Monday they had an anxious telephone call from a Methodist minister in Cardiff, saying that he thought, but couldn’t be absolutely certain, that the photograph resembled one of his parishioners, someone by the name of James Randall.

When they investigated, the Methodist minister’s misgivings about his parishioner turned out to be correct. James Randall was none other than Randall Morris and he was brought to Swansea for questioning. He was a tall man, over six feet tall, with thick, unruly red hair. When asked prior to the interrogation if he wanted a solicitor, Morris declined, explaining that his innocence denied any necessity for a lawyer to be present. He had, he said, nothing to hide and would answer all their questions.

It seemed that Randall Morris had got religion, and like many religious converts, had become a Bible-thumping zealot and claimed he was deeply ashamed of his past and wanted to atone for his sins. Perhaps, his interrogators thought, he wanted to rid the world of the other sinners too.

He also owned a small Fiat and had no alibi for the nights in question.

Suddenly it looked as if they had a specific suspect in custody.

But as they questioned him, frustration mounting, Morris’s religious armour shone with righteousness, in spite of his tainted past. After a gruelling interrogation, a confession seemed highly unlikely, especially as the man now sought refuge in a protective madness, the same form of insanity adopted by thousands of extremists the world over. Lambert brought the interview to an end.

For once, though, he wholeheartedly agreed with Marden that they should detain Morris in custody as long as the law would allow.

As the Monday drew to a close, not a single one on the team suggested going for a drink. They all went their separate ways, Lambert to his nearest local in the Mumbles, where he started off with a couple of pints, and then switched to red wine. A lethal combination, but it had to be done.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a couple in a quiet corner of the bar, eyeing each other with lust and affection, giggling and sharing an intimacy inside their cosy bubble of love, and it heightened his own loneliness. Nothing but aching emptiness within, a yearning and a longing with no clear idea what it was he wanted from life. Working in a job that could change from challenging to tedious in the blink of an eye, dealing with dirty and despicable people, and yet there was undoubtedly something which motivated him, something which kept driving him on.

He hadn’t been paying much attention to the pub’s background music playing softly, but then his hearing adjusted as he recognized one of his favourites: John Lennon’s ‘Watching The Wheels’. And there was that line in the song coming up. ‘There’s no such thing as problems, only solutions.’

Easy enough to write as a line in a song, thought Lambert, but the reality was different. How was he to conquer the frustration of never knowing whether his father had abused his sister? Now that she was dead, there was no solution, and the problem remained unsolved, which no one in the future would ever resolve.

He had one more drink before heading back to his flat. As he walked towards the building, not for the first time he wondered if the gloomy granite had been imported from Aberdeen way back, perhaps in return for slate. The greyness of the stone seemed to be a shroud of depression about to envelop him, and he imagined a lonely heart attack one day, with no one to discover his body for days. Perhaps weeks.

The building consisted of two purpose-built maisonettes and Lambert’s was on the ground floor. The upstairs maisonette had a flight of stone steps leading up from the side of the building, and outside the entrance door at the top of the stairs, an estate agent’s board advertised that it was To Let.

He was almost glad it was a recession. Maybe the landlords would find it difficult to let the upstairs flat, and he could live undisturbed for a while. No pounding feet, no smoker’s hacking cough, and certainly no hip-hop like the last tenant’s addiction!

His flat had a tiny entrance hall, like an airlock, leading to what he described as his dreary living room, which he did nothing to improve. Since his divorce from Helen, he lacked incentive for domestic improvement. As long as he had a few creature comforts …

A rumble in his stomach reminded him that yet again he’d denied his body any sustenance. He staggered into the claustrophobic kitchen and cooked a frozen lasagne in the microwave, then opened another bottle of wine. When he returned to the living room, he sat in front of the television, randomly clicked the remote, and eventually settled for another BBC2 documentary about last year’s banking fiasco and how they had squandered billions of pounds.

He watched the programme without taking it in as he forced the lasagne inside himself. His mind was bombarded with questions to do with the case. Something lay just out of reach, like the hand of a person in a film reaching for assistance before plummeting into the depths below.

What the hell was it that eluded him?

He was still none the wiser by the time the wine bottle was two thirds empty. By now his brain was fuzzy, so he took himself off to bed and was fast asleep as soon as his head hit the pillow.