Thorne grunted a yes.

‘Fair enough, I suppose. Cotterill and Quinn are both nasty pieces of work.’ He stretched out an arm, waved the paper for Thorne to take. ‘This case doesn’t fit either of them, though.’

‘Harry Cotterill took a building-society teller hostage in 1989…’

‘It’s not the same thing. These two aren’t kidnappers.’

‘They’ll know people, though.’

‘I can’t see it.’

‘They’re both around, at any rate,’ Thorne took the paper, folded it and put it back in his pocket. ‘Worth having a look at, surely?’

‘You asked me what I thought,’ Jesmond said. ‘It’s an SO7 job, so it’s Barry Hignett’s call anyway.’

Thorne took a breath of diesel and burning rubber. Used it to say thank you, though it was very much for nothing.

Later, when Holland had seen him as one of a very different group, it became clear to him that the boy stood out, that he was the one you focused on, whomever he was with. There was a physicality that drew the eye; a look-at me-if-you-want-to swagger. A confidence. A lot of them had that, of course; it went with the uniform, and the accent, and the knowledge that, barring disaster, they were going to do fairly well for themselves. This boy was different, though; he looked like he knew it and he couldn’t care less.

Holland and Parsons had been talking to a group of girls. Sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds, confident in a different way still from their male counterparts. They answered questions succinctly and then posed a few of their own. They flirted and laughed. Holland had laughed right back, well aware that some of the girls were highly attractive and that they knew it. He watched them walking away, then turned to see Parsons staring at him, mock-stern, an eyebrow raised.

‘Easy, tiger…’

‘Don’t be so bloody silly!’ As Holland snapped, he remembered Thorne saying exactly the same thing, in exactly the same way, when certain veiled suggestions had been made about DI Louise Porter. Then he turned back towards the door to the school and saw the boy.

He was with three others; not the tallest, nor the one at the front as they came out into the quad, but he was still the focal point. He made some comment and the others laughed, and Holland could see straight away that he was the leader. The one around whom the other boys moved.

As the group approached, Holland watched the boy make subtle alterations to his appearance: the daily change from classroom to street. The tie was loosened and lowered, fingers pushed the blond hair into spikes, and when the hand had finished working at the side of the head a gold cross was dangling from the boy’s left ear.

Holland stared at the earring. There was something familiar about it; something important.

Parsons held out a hand, beckoned the group towards them. ‘We’re talking to anyone who might have seen what happened to Luke Mullen last Friday afternoon.’

There was a good deal of shrugging and shuffling of feet. More than one pair of eyes settled on the boy with the earring.

‘Presumably that’s when you’d have been coming out of school,’ Parsons said. ‘Perhaps one of you saw Luke Mullen getting into a car.’

There was a pause before answers began to tumble out, clumsily, one on top of the other.

‘Loads of kids are getting into cars…’

‘I was playing rugby last Friday…’

‘There was a meeting for next year’s skiing trip…’

‘I don’t think we can help you.’

Answering last, the boy with the earring spoke with that odd, almost mid-Atlantic accent that Holland had heard in many of the pupils already: an upward intonation at the end of every sentence, as if everything were a nice, easy question being asked of someone who really ought to know the answer. The boy spoke for the other three, and Holland could see that they were happy to let him do so. He was the one each of them was keen to hang around with and to emulate; the friend they wanted. Holland remembered the boy with the briefcase, the young artist they’d spoken to earlier. This boy was everything that one was not, and probably most wanted to be.

Holland, if he was honest, had been as neither boy himself. At secondary school in Kingston twenty years before, he’d slogged it out somewhere between the two extremes. Head down; unhappily anonymous.

The four boys were already starting to amble away, but Kenny Parsons walked quickly after them, moved ahead and halted their progress. ‘Hang on, lads, we haven’t finished.’

‘Haven’t we?’ the boy with the earring asked.

‘One of your friends is missing.’

‘I barely know him.’ One of the others laughed. The boy with the earring shot him a look, shut him up instantly.

‘So you’re not in the same class?’

‘Correct. We’re not.’

‘Same year?’

‘Also correct. I don’t see how any of this is really helping, though, do you?’ He was already on the move again, hitching his bag across his shoulder and walking towards the main road.

Holland watched the boy and his friends depart. Something familiar about the boy’s face, too; something important. Thinking about the way he’d spoken to Parsons; the way he’d looked at a police officer.

A black police officer…

‘Cheeky little fucker,’ Parsons said.

It was a jolt, like the gut-lurch you feel driving over a humpback bridge, when Holland finally dragged the picture into focus. The cross dangling from the ear. A face he’d seen before.

‘I thought these posh kids had better manners than that.’

Holland nodded, knowing that this was exactly the point; that, if he was right, ‘cheeky’ was not the half of it.

The boy with the earring could afford to be sure of himself. It went with the uniform and the accent, for sure, but it also went with the fact that people made judgements about character on the strength of how you looked and sounded. Most people believed what such things had always told them.

Holland collared the next kid who passed and pointed towards the boy with the spiky hair. He asked the question and was given a name. Then he watched the boy called Adrian Farrell turn to look at them and walk slowly backwards down the drive, the blond hair still visible as he was absorbed, uniform by uniform, into the exodus of blue and grey.

The boy could well afford to be confident, because appearances were just that. And police officers, just like everybody else, made stupid assumptions.

Thorne, though usually more likely to brood than complain, was not beyond a decent moan every so often; and Carol Chamberlain, if she was in the right mood, could be a good listener. He grumbled into the phone about his back, about being shifted to the Kidnap Unit, about the fact that his only real avenue of investigation was rapidly turning into a cul-de-sac.

Carol Chamberlain was not in the right mood. ‘You should go and see someone,’ she said.

‘What, like a psychiatrist?’

‘That as well, but I’m talking about your back. Shut up about it and go and see a doctor.’

After the chat with Jesmond, Thorne had walked back to Becke House and run the two newest names on the list through CRIMINT. Billy Campbell was reported to be attending a drug and alcohol rehab centre in Scotland. Wayne Barber had finally got round to using that screwdriver and was serving life with a twenty-five-year tariff in Wakefield Prison. That left only Mullen’s original two, and Jesmond had made it clear he thought they were both a waste of time.

Thorne had started to feel like he was wading through treacle. He’d grabbed a sandwich from the canteen and walked back up to the Major Incident Room. Wondered whom he could possibly call up and complain to while he ate his lunch.

He’d known ex-DCI Carol Chamberlain for a couple of years. She’d been brought out of retirement in her early fifties and recruited for the Area Major Review Unit, a small team comprising previously retired officers, put together to take a fresh look at cold cases. They were known – not always affectionately – as the Crinkly Squad.