He still couldn’t say the words out loud: in case my wife tries to kill our child again. He didn’t think it could ever happen again – Gill had suffered a huge mental breakdown – but, on the other hand, he’d never had any indication that it could happen in the first place, and the risks just seemed too great. Sleeping in his single bedroom at his folks’ house with Bonnie in a toddler bed next to him – which meant actually in bed with him at some point every night – had been a small price to pay for the knowledge that she was safe. But he still had to go out to work every day, so his mum and dad had taken over the childcare. There had been no other options – at least, not affordable ones.

‘Does she want you both to come home?’

Patrick saw the distinctive red and white lettering of the hotel’s sign in the distance and slowed down, killing the blues and twos. He turned and gave Carmella a rueful smile.

‘She does, but she’s scared. I’m not sure she trusts herself around Bonnie anymore, however well she feels now.’

Carmella opened her mouth to ask another question and Patrick would have put money on what it was: What about you and her? But thankfully she chose not to ask.

Because that was one question Patrick really couldn’t answer.

He pulled into the hotel’s car park and parked in a space next to the three squad cars and one police van already present.

‘Right.’ They got out and strode purposefully towards the hotel entrance. ‘Let’s see what we’ve got.’

Chapter 2

Day 1 – Patrick

Crime tape was strung across the third-floor corridor, the rooms in this stretch vacated, the guests moved to other rooms. In the lobby, Patrick had spoken briefly to the manager, a woman with a Brummie accent who looked like she’d applied her eyebrows with a child’s black crayon, and told her that they would need a list of all the guests, including anyone who had checked out. He had expected the usual tedious complaint about privacy and the bloody Data Protection Act, but the manager, whose name was Heidi Shillingham, had said, ‘Yes, of course. Anything we – anything I – can do to help.’

She smiled obsequiously and, in the lift, Carmella had winked at Patrick and said, ‘She wants you.’

Patrick ducked under the yellow tape just as DS Gareth Batey emerged from the room, his face white with a hint of green. His jaw clenched and he swallowed, like he was trying to stop himself from throwing up. A bad sign. Gareth was a valuable member of MIT9, a young detective who was definitely going places – though with every day, with every grim case, the sheen of his enthusiasm and earnestness was rubbed off a little more. One day he’ll be as hard-bitten and resigned as the rest of us, Patrick thought. Poor sod.

‘All right, Gareth,’ he said.

‘Boss.’ Batey swallowed again, blew air from his cheeks.

‘Feeling OK?’

Gareth nodded, but his eyes showed that he was feeling far from OK. There was a rich smell creeping out of the room – the coppery odour of blood and something else. Cheap perfume or aftershave that stung Patrick’s nostrils and made him want to sneeze.

‘The SOCOs here yet?’ Patrick asked.

‘On their way.’

‘Good. So tell me what we know so far.’ He knew that as the first senior officer on the scene this case would almost certainly be his. He took out his pocket-sized Moleskine notepad and looked at Gareth, daring him to smirk. But the younger cop was too nauseated, and too used to Patrick’s little quirks, to be amused.

‘The chambermaid entered the room this morning just after 10 a.m. and found her. She was very cool about it, apparently. No screaming. No panic. She made sure she didn’t touch anything, locked the door behind her and calmly went downstairs to tell them what she’d found.’

‘OK. Is she still around? I’ll want to talk to her.’

‘Yes. She’s downstairs in the manager’s office.’

‘Good.’ He nodded for Gareth to continue.

‘I already asked Ms Shillingham for details of who was staying in the room. But nobody was checked in. The room was supposed to be empty.’

Bang went the chance of this being an easy case, a nice stat to make the clear-up rate look better.

Gareth fell quiet, as if he had nothing more to say – not till Patrick had looked in the room, witnessed the scene. He was aware that he was stalling, delaying the moment when he would have to see the body, the source of that bloody smell. Recently he’d begun to wonder if he was losing the stomach for this job, if he should quit, do something different. But what else would he do? The only other job he’d wanted was to be a rock star, to go on tour supporting his heroes, The Cure. That was one dream that would never come true.

He motioned to Carmella. ‘Come on, then. Let’s take a look.’

Being careful not to touch anything, he entered the hotel room. Immediately, the chemical sting of perfume made him sneeze, and as he opened his watering eyes he saw her. The victim. He heard Carmella catch her breath behind him.

She was laid out on the bed, naked and spread-eagled in an X-shape, each limb pointing towards a corner of the bed. She had light brown hair; pale, freckly skin; downy hairs on her arms. A strip of pubic hair, shaved legs and armpits. Patrick felt his breathing deepen and the anger that fuelled him, that kept him doing this damn job, bubbled and simmered as he realised how young she was. Somewhere between thirteen and fifteen. A child, though doubtless she would have recoiled to hear herself described as one.

Her eyes were open, staring at a future that would never come. What had this girl’s dreams been? To travel the world or have a family? Be a doctor or pilot or footballer’s wife? However modest her ambitions, they were over. She would never go to university, get her first job, give birth, grow old. This was it. A life truncated. A full stop.

Patrick stepped closer, trying to ignore, for the moment, the injuries, the mortal wounds, his eyes refusing to focus on them. He wanted to see the victim, to get to know her for a moment. To make this personal.

The girl was fleshy, with large breasts and a soft stomach, wide thighs. He guessed she had a BMI of about 26 or 27. It was a body that hundreds of years ago would have been considered perfect, the ideal of womanhood, but not now, in the days when emaciation was the look most young women craved. He studied her face. She wasn’t pretty, not in a conventional way, anyway. Her nose was a little too large, her eyes too close together. It crossed his mind that this would make the media less interested, that her face wouldn’t sell many newspapers, which could be both positive and negative for the investigation. The last big case he’d worked, the so-called Child Catcher case, had been a media shit storm from the off. Unlike his colleague DI Winkler, Patrick wasn’t the kind of cop who craved attention. In fact, despite his youthful desire to be a singer in a band, he abhorred it.

He closed his eyes for a second and made this young woman a silent promise. He would do everything he could to find the person who had done this. The man – in this case, it surely had to be a man – who had ended her young life.

There were marks on her throat that made it evident she had been strangled. But that was far from the most striking thing. There were cuts, short and shallow, all over her body, including her breasts and inner thighs, tiny trickles of blood patterning her skin. One of her outstretched hands was twisted and bloody, as if it had been stamped on. Her lips were puffy and smeared with dried blood too, like they had been punched or, perhaps, bitten. As he stepped closer he noticed that her skin was shiny in patches around the welts, and also around her vagina. The smell of perfume coming off her was intense.