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fine by me. What does everyone else think?’
    Murmurs of agreement filled the room.
    ‘That’s settled then.’ Monty took a swallow of cold coffee and pulled a face. ‘To recap, we know she was somehow abducted from the street, taken somewhere else to be murdered, then somehow transported to the bank and posed.’
    ‘What about a taxi?’ Barry asked. ‘She could have decided not to catch the bus and gone for a taxi instead.’
    Wayne nodded, pulling thoughtfully at a long feathery sideburn. ‘That could have happened. That or someone she knew stopped and gave her a lift.’
    ‘Would she have got into the car of a stranger?’ Barry asked.
    ‘By all accounts she was a sensible girl,’ Angus said. ‘Her uncle and grandfather were cops, there’s no way she would have been unaware of the dangers.’
    Angus and Stevie had been the principal detectives interviewing the friends and family. In the case of such a low-risk victim, family and close friends were always the first suspects. In this case, though, they’d felt the immediate family could be eliminated. Her twelve-year-old brother and her mother could not be considered, and her father, with his chronic heart problem, had been assessed as physically incapable of the murder.
    Angus continued, ‘She wasn’t drunk, it’s not like she was desperate for a lift, the weather was fine and she had the bus money. Her mother said there was no way she would have accepted a lift from a stranger.’
    ‘Perhaps she was pulled into a car. Someone could have stopped to ask her directions then grabbed her. God knows it’s been done countless times before,’ Barry said.
    ‘Well, if that’s the case,’ Monty replied, ‘maybe someone saw some kind of a struggle.’
    Stevie’s grip tightened on her pen.
    She’d tried to run, but one of her heels had caught in the concrete slabs and she’d slammed head first onto the path. He was on her in an instant, ripping and tearing at her clothes.
    She could see the scene as clearly in her mind’s eye as if she were watching it on TV. She screwed her eyes tight for a moment and willed herself to concentrate on Monty’s voice.
    ‘Maybe the re-enactment will jog a memory. Meanwhile, Angus, I want you to canvass the taxi companies. Get some uniform help and those seconded dees from Stirling. I want to know the whereabouts of every single cab between nine and eleven that Sunday night.’
    Angus’s face fell. ‘That could take weeks.’
    ‘Which we don’t have. So make it days, preferably hours. So long as each cab has kept their required log, it’ll just be a case of slogging through each one.’
    ‘And speaking of slogging, Mont, I think I’ve been lucky with the trace on the bronze paint.’ Wayne leaned back in his chair, ‘Listen and weep, Angus, no more of the hard grind for me. A call came in just after the press conference last night. The owner of a hobby shop in Kensington said that his employee, a Mr Craig Thompson, mentioned selling a dozen cans of bronze fabric paint to a man last week. Not many people buy that much paint and it got him wondering.’
    ‘Kensington, isn’t that where the vic came from?’ Barry’s question was more of a statement and no one answered him.
    ‘What else did he say? Did you get a description of the man?’ Monty asked.
    ‘I thought this was too important for the phone,’ Wayne replied. ‘I’ve made an appointment to see Thompson early this afternoon.’
    ‘Good, keep me up to date.’
    ‘Do we know if Linda had a boyfriend?’ Barry asked Stevie.
    ‘Yes, about the same age as she was. According to the mother he’s been working on a farm in Meckering. They were saving up for a skiing holiday. He was in Meckering at the time of the murder. The farm manager vouched for him.’
    ‘Did she work?’ Wayne asked her.
    ‘Only part time—as a waitress at the Blue Fish, that trendy restaurant by the beach in Cottesloe. She was waiting for her big break into the modelling world.