Izzy briefly paused, adjusting the position she was sitting in before pointing towards the papers on the floor. ‘There are all sorts of witness statements, not many of them that useful. Toby went there with his friends to kick a football around but one by one they went home. There doesn’t seem to be anything fishy about their statements and none of them were suspects at the time. It seems as if Toby was left on his own and then, at some point, he just disappeared.’

‘Did anyone see anything?’ Jessica asked.

Izzy picked up a page from the floor and skimmed it, looking for a certain detail. ‘Apparently not. Have you ever been with your mates on a night out and, before you know it, there’s only one or two of you left standing? It sounds like that. He’d gone to play, it started to get dark and he was left by himself. A couple of the witnesses, people who weren’t his friends but were hanging around the site, say they saw him on his own, while one of his mates say they went their own ways when it was just the two of them left. It sounds a bit odd but I remember things like that happening when I was a kid.’

‘Eleven’s a bit young, isn’t it? How close was the land to his house?’

Izzy put down the paper and reached for another. ‘Not that far, maybe half a mile? I don’t really know the area.’

‘And how close is this site to the woods where we found the clothes?’

Izzy returned the set of papers to the floor and shuffled her position. ‘Pretty close, a few hundred yards maybe?’

Jessica said nothing for a moment but there was something concerning her. ‘Why do you think we found the clothes now? We know they were washed relatively recently and presumably buried at more or less the same time? Someone must have been keeping them ever since Toby was taken. Not only that but the driver who had Isaac Hutchings in the back of his car had a map directly to the spot.’

It was more a statement than a question. The similarities between the two abductions were obvious and Jessica wondered if their unknown driver was the person who had kidnapped Toby all those years ago. If that was true, why would he need a map to the boy’s clothes? It seemed that every time they found an answer, it opened up another set of questions.

There was another short silence before Jessica spoke again. ‘So what happened with the investigation?’

Reynolds and Izzy exchanged a look before the inspector answered. ‘From what we can tell, not a lot because there weren’t any leads. Parents, uncles, aunts, all the relatives were accounted for and no one seemed to have a motive. Apart from the witnesses who said they saw him walking away from the site, there were no suspicious car sightings, no signs of a struggle, nothing. There weren’t as many CCTV cameras back then, so there’s nothing from that. One of the parents said something about having a falling out with one of their neighbours because of an incident involving Toby riding a bike across the person’s front garden but it sounds very petty and it looks as if it was discounted.’

‘So it was just unsolved and he was never found?’ Jessica asked.

Izzy nodded. ‘Exactly. When I was going through things I was surprised by how many unsolved missing children cases there are. It’s not just our district, obviously, but over the years there are hundreds of kids unaccounted for. You never hear about them.’

Jessica knew the statement had extra meaning for the constable because of her own pregnancy. ‘Does anyone here remember the case?’

‘We’ve asked around but no one knows anything specifically,’ Reynolds said. ‘I wasn’t here but the DCI says the boundary of who investigated what was much more blurred back then – although he wasn’t here either. I’m sure someone will remember but we’ve not really had time to properly ask yet.’

Jessica knew what he was talking about. She worked for the Metropolitan branch of Greater Manchester CID, while there were separate divisions for the north, south, east and west areas of the city. Everything had been broken up not long after she joined as a uniformed officer around a decade ago. She knew that fourteen years back there was just one CID branch covering the entire area. Because of that, it was no wonder the paperwork was so disorganised as detectives and officers would have been moved to new departments and things would have been lost along the way.

‘Do we at least have the name of whoever was leading the investigation?’ Jessica asked. She saw Izzy and Reynolds swap a nervous glance and felt something sink in her stomach. She knew the name of the person involved before the inspector spoke the words: ‘It was DI Harry Thomas.’

Jessica stared at the row of six intercom buzzers and took another deep breath, her third in less than a minute. Each time she hovered her finger over the button, before withdrawing it. She was standing at the top of a small flight of concrete steps outside the block of flats where Harry lived. She hadn’t seen him in over three years and hadn’t thought she would ever do so again. At the station both Cole and Reynolds had offered to visit Harry instead of, or with, her but Jessica insisted she wanted to do it on her own. Both officers knew how close Jessica had been to him at one point as they were both already detectives when she started in CID and Harry was their colleague too. As with a lot of things, probably too many, they trusted her judgement and, on this occasion, Jessica wanted to go on her own.

In most cases where a former officer needed to be spoken to, he or she would be invited to the station formally if it was something serious, or it could be a lunchtime chat in the pub if it wasn’t. Harry had deliberately cut all ties to his former workplace so Jessica talked her fellow detectives into letting her doorstep him. No one was confident he would be helpful if they gave him much notice. As far as they knew he hadn’t moved to another property but there was only one way they would find out for sure.

Jessica again raised her finger to the doorbell without putting any pressure on it but her mind was made up as a pitter-patter of raindrops began to fall behind her. She hunched her shoulders and pulled the top of her jacket over her head. It was almost as if a higher power was telling her to get on with it and Jessica finally relented, pushing the button and hearing a buzzing noise from the intercom. The noise of the rain increased and she tried to shelter her body under a small roof that overhung the front door. If anything, it was only making her wetter as water dripped from where she could see the eroded sealant above her.

Jessica stabbed the intercom again and, just as she was beginning to eye her car parked on the road as the only available dry spot nearby, the device finally crackled into life. ‘Who is it?’ said a voice from the other end.

‘Harry? It’s Jessica Daniel. Can you let me in? It’s shitting it down out here.’

The intercom hissed and went silent. For a moment, she thought nothing was going to happen before a click indicated the door had opened. Jessica quickly pushed her way into the deserted hallway and pulled her jacket back down from over her head. The rain reminded her of what Kayla Hutchings said that morning about how she would have picked her son up if it had been a wet day. Jessica thought about how entire lives could change because of something as random as whether or not it rained.

Jessica had visited Harry at his flat in the past and started to walk up the hard, echoing concrete steps at the back of the porch. The place where he lived was in a row of old civil-service buildings not far from the city centre. Each property had been converted into six flats around twenty years ago, and then sold off to private investors. At some point they would have been attractive places to live but Jessica could see paint flaking from the once-cream walls as she walked up the stairs.