For thirty years, the ghost of Nancy Guthrie has been doing a better job haunting the British justice system than most living detectives. The trail went dead, you see. Well, let us rephrase that: the trail was murdered, stuffed in a filing cabinet, and left to moulder under a pile of budget cuts and bureaucratic indifference.
The national cold case review, that great hope of the grieving, has turned out to be about as effective as a chocolate teapot at a séance. The police insist they have left no stone unturned, but we all know they have simply stacked the stones into a neat little cairn over the grave of proper investigation. A witness here, a missed call there, a forgotten piece of evidence dissolving in a damp evidence locker.
It is a symphony of incompetence, conducted by people who have never met a deadline they couldn't ignore or a family they couldn't placate with a sorry. Nancy Guthrie, whoever you are now, wherever your bones lie, we owe you better than this. We owe you a trail that doesn't rely on the memory of a constable who retired twenty years ago and now spends his days growing prize-winning marrows.
So here is the question that no one in authority wants to ask: who let the trail go cold? And more importantly, what were they hiding?
