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All Caroline wanted was to go home, but the wheels of police procedure meant that wouldn’t be possible for a few hours yet. There was the never-ending pile of paperwork that had to be completed first, starting with detailed notes in her policy book on what had happened at Fineshade Wood.
It was always important to get the details down while they were still fresh in the mind, not least because a defence team could quite reasonably try to poke holes in the police’s account had it been written down days later, once the details had become fuzzy and the officers’ recollections turned hazier.
It was sod’s law that these sorts of investigations never came to a head mid-morning or just after lunch. It certainly would’ve made them easier to write up, without having to work into the early hour
